Reply to Can we never do Open Streets again?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road. WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk. [/quote]

Sounds like you felt the same way about pedestrians as many drivers feel about cyclists. I’m sorry “you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed,” because you had to share the road with slower moving people. It does suck.[/quote]

I have no problem with people walking.

Just do it on the sidewalks where you're supposed to. The street is not for people walking. It's for things with wheels, moving faster than you can walk. And in this case of open streets, that means bicycles. Streets were not designed for people. Period. [/quote]

Yes. Before cars, there was no such thing as a street.[/quote]

Yeah the whole point of events like Open Streets is to show that the way that streets currently exist or were designed does not currently work for the vast majority of people who live in the area.  So yes technically streets were at some point designed for cars but that is a clear misuse of city space and resources as it is dangerous and unpleasant to walk around Georgia Avenue.  So hopefully this is a step in the right direction of them getting redesigned to be more people centric rather than car centric.

Street were at some point re-designed te be car centric but that is changing- hopefully in ten years this whole "streets were designed around cars, get over it and get out of my way" line of thought will be dead because streets will be designed around people instead.  [/quote]

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