As a Parisian, I'm dismayed to see the positive coverage of the city's policies. Costly, never-ending works make walking (I'm primarily a pedestrian) a nerve-wracking adventure, forcing us to navigate narrow corridors while so-called embellishments go on and on. Cyclists and e-scooter riders whizz down the sidewalks and ignore traffic rules. Meanwhile, stores and eateries are shuttering everywhere. Take a walk down the Avenue Général Leclerc (the General drove down it to liberate Paris in August 1944) and the famous Boulevard Saint-Michel, and lose count of the number of places that have shut down since I came to live in the area in 2005. Excuses are made for this: the growth of suburban shopping malls, COVID, among others.
But the City makes only the feeblest efforts to fine scofflaws and revive business, preferring instead to boast of "vegetalization" (now dying in the successive heatwaves) and the reductions in car traffic, while failing to address the knock-on effects of emptier roads.
Since we're speaking anecdotally I'll provide a counter perspective as a Parisian of 10 years who has loved these policies - I don't see that same experience. I have only seen the city bloom and become more accessible compared to when I first moved here - more green space, more pedestrian paths, more third spaces to meet AND more commerce. I also personally just circulate on foot much easier than I did before without fighting cars parked on the sidewalk or driving too fast down the street - this is also my main method of transport within the city AND my sport since I'm a runner.
Also anecdotally, there are always new stores, coffee shops, art galleries opening where I live near Place de la République, notably since the streets have become more restricted to car traffice. There are very few store fronts that do close that don't have something new within a month. Looking at the data, vacancy rates of store fronts went DOWN from 13% to 5-8% on streets like Rue de Rivioli after they were pedestrianized (actually more like Market Street actually, with buses and taxis allowed). I'd assume more that if you have problems like that in the Latin Quarter it's more a price problem - with more areas of Paris have been opened up with the change of policies more areas have become desirable and accessible perhaps diminishing the corner on the market your the Latin Quarter once had.
I really personally can't imagine bringing cars and street parking would bring back so many people to support the business there either - they have always been a small share of Parisians in the first place that the policy changes were natural.
I concede the cyclists do need more enforcement but even so I've never had an incident nor have I witnessed any collisions with pedestrians and cyclists or scooters, not a single one - and again I am right next to the central hub of République with a lot of thru traffic.
I'm not sure I expressed myself as well as I might have. As a mainly stone-faced, traffic-jammed city, Paris definitely needed ways to cool down and improve air quality. To that extent, the City's aims are correct. The greening began in the 1990s under Mayor Tiberi (charged with corruption) and his aide Françoise de Panafieu, who expanded the number and quality of parks and gardens. The process has continued under the present regimes, though, I would argue, at reckless expense. The City's debt burden has gone up from around 4.2 billion euros in 1914, to between 9.4 and 10.7 billion now (depending on the accounting scope chosen). With a debt load like that, the City could have adopted more modest road and pavement works than it has.
If you regard Paris as a place for tourists to visit, then perhaps more greenery and less traffic, with more cafés in tourist spots, is a plus. As a place for families and elderly people to live, perhaps not. Increasingly silent private vehicles are being replaced by ear-shattering motorbikes, sirens, and noisy café terraces that pursue their loud chatter and guffawing sometimes till 2 am. A scourge in the hot summer nights, when leaving windows open is the best hope of surviving the heat. Complaining to the police or the town hall is pointless, their chief goal being to sustain such businesses as manage to stay above water. (By the way, how many food stores or other traders providing the essentials of ordinary life have opened on the Rue de Rivoli?).
Lastly, and I'll be branded as a stiff-necked reactionary for this, but still: for centuries Paris has made the debatable boast of being the most beautiful city in the world. Beautiful for the harmony of its buildings and bustling streets, with enticing food stores, restaurants, museums... Turning it into a kind of Green Mansions with cycles, e-scooters, novelty stalls and street food stalls is, without wishing to sound hysterical, little short of a crime against beauty.
It’s not perfect but better than market street I guess… my daughter just went to Paris and liked it a lot! And she also liked what the city of Toulouse is doing with pedestrian friendly zones! We should learn from success 😊
I really shouldn't knock pedestrian-friendly zones: I first encountered them in the Italian city of Ferrara in 2002, and thought "This is what they should be doing in Paris". So, please allow me to be ambivalent and, like Paul Valéry, to think two opposiing things at once.
To an extent isn’t this the “Housing Theory of Everything” strikes again. To me the real key component of what closing off Market Street didn’t work as intended is your point about the lack of mixed use development. If there were actual residents living these areas then a lot of these stores would have remained open and the ones that didn’t survive would attract new businesses better suited to serve local residents.
I’m reading this thinking San Francisco Centre should absolutely become multi family housing. I know, I know very difficult to do and very costly. But you know with the exception of maybe Manhattan South if 125th street there may not be a place in America where super expensive construction costs are still worth it given the extreme high demand for housing and land costs.
Also, this is the part I’m not sure of. Shouldn’t SB79 be very conducive to apartment conversions in this stretch precisely because of the variety of bus stops on Market Street. In theory shouldn’t the law pre-empt the usual white haired residents showing up to protest changing “historic” San Francisco Centre and the shadows people will bring that will block tomato gardens?
I don’t know why, but San Francisco seems to hate new mixed-use development (they don’t really seem to like any development). While Mission St, Geary, Noe Valley and other neighborhoods have had mixed residential and retail for a long time, look at all the people opposed to the new Marina Safeway mixed-use project.
A number of American cities tried banning automobile traffic from their main shopping streets in the 1960s. It was thought that if traffic could be directed to parking garages on streets parallel to the main street the shops on the main street could better compete with the new malls. In those cities with which I am familiar this policy backfired and hastened the decay of downtown shopping. It is interesting to me that Austin, where I now live, has reinvigorated its downtown retail by building many residential condos and apartments downtown. Also, I recently visited Paris. At least in the parts of Paris which I frequented, automobile traffic was not constrained on the grand boulevards. The areas where the streets had been closed to auto traffic tended to be small and narrow streets in high pedestrian traffic areas. Apparently, from reading the other comments here, this is not the case throughout the city.
The urbanist movement against the tyranny of the personal automobile of the 00s and 10s was mostly good, in the general sense that urban areas shouldn't be subservient to the needs of cars, their high speed throughput, and parking.
However, the uncompromising progressive spirit leading this charge here brought with it some baggage that threatens to ruin the whole project; namely that (1) resources are infinite, if you can beat them out of billionaires, (2) if something is good, more of it is gooder and (3) once you call something a right, it's non-negotiable.
This meant that if deprioritizing cars is good, eliminating them was better; further, that pedestrians and cyclists had rights to their own cordoned off spaces (after all, anything less is an assault on their safety and humanity).
What you got was complicated, expensive street design that was off-putting and inflexible, engineered to great complication but unable to accommodate the complexity of a messy human place.
The best streets are not like this. They are not rigidly engineered. Cars are allowed, but move slowly because there's too much chaos for them to do anything else. Value is captured, throughput is deprioritized (that's what roads and freeways are for, not streets).
They don't seem to realize that the city center needs to be accessible to people from surrounding areas, not just people who live there. Driving in central SF is a nightmare, but it's light years better than public transit. Getting from the Marina to downtown is a 20 minute drive to cover only 3 miles, but public transit is an insane 40 minutes and two busses.
Getting there from an actual suburb is insanity. I commuted from San Mateo to the Mission for a bit and was lucky enough to be a 5 min walk from BART. By public transit it was drive 5-10 mins to the cal train, switch to the BART at Millbrae, and take it to 24th and mission. I did it exactly once and never again. As bad as sitting in 101 traffic 10 times a week is, it's a picnic compared to public transit.
Unless a dense and reliable transit system is built from the surrounding suburbs into the city all plans to get cars out of downtown will fail miserably.
The progressive mind is not dissimilar to the socialist mind. That government knows best and can impose policies that are best for citizens. Sounds good, right? But it fails more often than it succeeds.
I am not saying you shouldn’t have civic planning. But trying to impose an anti-car policy to meet your goal of preventing global warming is way more complicated than improving traffic flow. The idea that closing Market Street to autos will somehow save the planet from global warming is on a level of self-conceit that you can impose your will on people. That is not how humans behave.
Which brings me to the problem with socialism and progressivism. The attempt to manage how humans behave because you know best. This is how socialism ends up killing millions. How it has to be imposed at the end of the gun. It is a kind of hubris and completely forgets that humans are individuals. Behave as individuals.
The point was to try to create a better urban experience but a lot got in the way (crime, the pandemic and the rise of remote work that made office only downtown areas less viable) Good old capitalism got us there and good old capitalism will get us back 😎
Pedestrianization can work pretty well when it's implemented carefully with consideration for all the relevant stakeholders. They'll never turn Time Square back into an intersection. Unfortunately the progressives have been infected with lazy thinking and belief they can just ram things through.
Before I respond, I need to know: how in hell did you survive elementary and middle school with the name Poopersen? It must have been hell.
I think it is very common now in cities to have some streets as walking streets. It encourages bars, restaurants, and retail stores. But we have also seen streets that still allow cars to thrive. I wonder what their goal was in eliminating car traffic? The streets that are walk-only are not usually 6 lanes wide or major throughfares.
Exactly people just can’t ram things through. That’s what I like about the book Abundance.. it’s written by liberals/progressives but it’s full of examples where they could not just do things… much less ram things through. If nothing else we need zoning and permitting reform, and an end to NIMBYism 😎
I love pedestrian-only shopping areas. They need to be vehicle-free, with additional restrictions on bicycle use (bike lanes, for example). I normally walk distracted from my surroundings (looking at storefront signs and shop windows, navigating on my cell phone, checking texts, email, Google Maps, etc.). I have enough difficulty avoiding bumping into other pedestrians. The last thing I need is to worry about being hit by an Uber/Lyft, taxi, delivery truck, or trolley.
The best pedestrian-only shopping streets have alleyways behind the stores and restaurants that face the pedestrian-only zone to allow for deliveries and trash collection.
"The borough government designated a stretch of Mont-Royal" Avenue as closed to car traffic to make more open-air social and commercial space during COVID "but, notably, did not simply close the Avenue. They hired architecture firm Intégral Jean Beaudoin to holistically rethink this new public space, incorporating seating, public art, and greenery into the design."
"Local merchant sentiment is generally net-positive: a 2024 survey found that 43% of merchants saw sales rise during pedestrianization, while 30% experienced a decline, generally businesses that were car-dependent or lacked patio dining. The more telling number is commercial vacancy, which fell from 14.5% along Mont-Royal in 2018 to 5-to-6% by 2023."
I don't get down to Wall Street much, but the last time I was there, it seemed more vibrant than ever. Despite Jamie Dimon's best efforts, a lot of New Yorkers still work remotely, or hybrid. It would be weird if Market Street was a ghost town due to a car ban.
It helps that Wall Street is effectively free of motor vehicle traffic, and has been that way for like two decades prior to the pandemic. Market Street still has transit, trucks, and taxis, and the restrictions were introduced At the start of the pandemic.
Basically what Noah said. The level of motor vehicle traffic still allowed was still too much, and the timing was bad.
Market street has always been a bit of a dump - since I first started going to SF many decades ago. Soma used to be no man’s land (after dark). The development of Mission and SOMA for the tech companies and some of their workers helped boost its prospects for a time (though I never could understand why people would pay crazy rents to live there as opposed to half as much, pre-AI, in I/O Richmond or Sunset)
The financial district on the other side is what long kept Market alive (pre-tech), and that has shrunken quite a bit. Really no need to have big teams in downtown SF. California St. isn’t so bad, though and the Ferry building (really about tourists and socializing now rather than workers) has been a bright spot.
There is just zero need for a commercial street along Market. Mission and California and environs have enough commercial to meet the demands of the dwindling supply of workers. And you make good points about the banning of cars accelerating the demise of Market.
However, with both the financial district and union square being shadows of their former selves (and tech traffic on Mission not rebounding to pre-Covid levels) there is really no need for market street to be anything but a conduit for traffic and the homeless.
This is a depressing and pessimistic view - there is tons of housing along this corridor, that if it was clean and safe and accessible with cars, people would gladly live there. That would bring shops and restaurants and other businesses back!
I heard an interesting story from a business owner in the Dogpatch about how he moved from Union Square 10 years ago because rents were getting too high, and so he bought a place cheaply. Now, the Dogpatch is booming, and the startups are taking cheap space in Union Square. It goes in cycles!
Cars never made sense on Market Street, because of the way it gashes through the street grid. Transit vehicles that just go on a straight line down the whole street are fine, and cars or delivery vehicles that do a right turn onto the street, and a right turn off of it at the next intersection are fine. But anyone trying to cross it and doing a left turn causes problems for everyone.
I am deeply interested in these posts, I love reading about a city's problems, its historical causes and impact, and the possible solutions. I look forward to the post about why San Francisco crime went down.
Write what you know and all that, but I'd be interested in posts about other cities in the US or even across the world, focusing on what works and what doesn't. The dive into Tokyo's mixed-use urbanism was one I enjoyed reading.
Yes, I noticed that too! I recently saw on the news that crime rates seem to be dropping not just in SF, but nationwide across the US. This definitely deserves a deep, thorough look, and I really hope to read an objective, high-quality analysis on it soon.
Seriously, if independent, rigorous scholars don't speak up and present the facts, politicians from every side will just try to claim all the credit for their own agendas.
This seems like yet another scenario where policy analysis was downed by 'aspirational ideology', the idea — seductive to both parties — that if you just prioritize enough Good Things Whose Goodness Is Arrived At Moral-Heuristically, this will magically translate to better outcomes. But this is a lot like trying to draft a basketball team because Making Three Point Shots Is Good, and thereby ignoring Bam Adebayo and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Great post! The 'thoroughfare vs. destination' distinction is vital to avoid making this type of mistake.
Someone should go through and tally up how much money has been lost in total by Americans assuming Europe is the same as America and Europeans assuming America is just like Europe. SF's misapplication of Paris's LTZ can be added to the list of previous failures such as, Tesco misunderstanding the US supermarket shopper with its Fresh & Easy US launch in 2007 (-£2bn) or UK telecoms companies like NTL getting the US cable-TV model the wrong way round when laying fibre-optic cable infrastructure (- £25bn).
I don't think it matters how many cars you allow on the street if there's nothing to visit in the first place. Some places in the Bay Area where pedestrianization has worked out are downtown Sunnyvale and Mountain View. In Sunnyvale they only closed off one street, but it's fully closed off to vehicles. They also added some plaza space where they have events, and temporarily close some streets for slightly larger events.
Mountain View closed off Castro Street to all vehicles going down the length of the street, though cars can pass over it. All of the parking lots/garages were never directly accessible from Castro Street anyway, and the reclaimed space can actually be used by pedestrians/restaurants for seating. Personally I find the space to be much more vibrant and inviting.
Not sure if there's a take away for Market Street specifically, but it does show that pedestrianization can work, even in a highly car oriented area. Just need to make sure the implementation is right.
You must have many, widely distributed mixed-use residential apartments and condos, along with pedestrian walkways, dedicated bike paths, and landscaped parks to create safe, inviting, lively and unique neighborhoods. Many eyes on the street, pedestrians outnumbering motorists, and autonomous vehicles can help make it safer. Americans, their vehicles and cities are in transition.
As a Parisian, I'm dismayed to see the positive coverage of the city's policies. Costly, never-ending works make walking (I'm primarily a pedestrian) a nerve-wracking adventure, forcing us to navigate narrow corridors while so-called embellishments go on and on. Cyclists and e-scooter riders whizz down the sidewalks and ignore traffic rules. Meanwhile, stores and eateries are shuttering everywhere. Take a walk down the Avenue Général Leclerc (the General drove down it to liberate Paris in August 1944) and the famous Boulevard Saint-Michel, and lose count of the number of places that have shut down since I came to live in the area in 2005. Excuses are made for this: the growth of suburban shopping malls, COVID, among others.
But the City makes only the feeblest efforts to fine scofflaws and revive business, preferring instead to boast of "vegetalization" (now dying in the successive heatwaves) and the reductions in car traffic, while failing to address the knock-on effects of emptier roads.
Since we're speaking anecdotally I'll provide a counter perspective as a Parisian of 10 years who has loved these policies - I don't see that same experience. I have only seen the city bloom and become more accessible compared to when I first moved here - more green space, more pedestrian paths, more third spaces to meet AND more commerce. I also personally just circulate on foot much easier than I did before without fighting cars parked on the sidewalk or driving too fast down the street - this is also my main method of transport within the city AND my sport since I'm a runner.
Also anecdotally, there are always new stores, coffee shops, art galleries opening where I live near Place de la République, notably since the streets have become more restricted to car traffice. There are very few store fronts that do close that don't have something new within a month. Looking at the data, vacancy rates of store fronts went DOWN from 13% to 5-8% on streets like Rue de Rivioli after they were pedestrianized (actually more like Market Street actually, with buses and taxis allowed). I'd assume more that if you have problems like that in the Latin Quarter it's more a price problem - with more areas of Paris have been opened up with the change of policies more areas have become desirable and accessible perhaps diminishing the corner on the market your the Latin Quarter once had.
I really personally can't imagine bringing cars and street parking would bring back so many people to support the business there either - they have always been a small share of Parisians in the first place that the policy changes were natural.
I concede the cyclists do need more enforcement but even so I've never had an incident nor have I witnessed any collisions with pedestrians and cyclists or scooters, not a single one - and again I am right next to the central hub of République with a lot of thru traffic.
Thank you for this counterpoint.
I'm not sure I expressed myself as well as I might have. As a mainly stone-faced, traffic-jammed city, Paris definitely needed ways to cool down and improve air quality. To that extent, the City's aims are correct. The greening began in the 1990s under Mayor Tiberi (charged with corruption) and his aide Françoise de Panafieu, who expanded the number and quality of parks and gardens. The process has continued under the present regimes, though, I would argue, at reckless expense. The City's debt burden has gone up from around 4.2 billion euros in 1914, to between 9.4 and 10.7 billion now (depending on the accounting scope chosen). With a debt load like that, the City could have adopted more modest road and pavement works than it has.
If you regard Paris as a place for tourists to visit, then perhaps more greenery and less traffic, with more cafés in tourist spots, is a plus. As a place for families and elderly people to live, perhaps not. Increasingly silent private vehicles are being replaced by ear-shattering motorbikes, sirens, and noisy café terraces that pursue their loud chatter and guffawing sometimes till 2 am. A scourge in the hot summer nights, when leaving windows open is the best hope of surviving the heat. Complaining to the police or the town hall is pointless, their chief goal being to sustain such businesses as manage to stay above water. (By the way, how many food stores or other traders providing the essentials of ordinary life have opened on the Rue de Rivoli?).
Lastly, and I'll be branded as a stiff-necked reactionary for this, but still: for centuries Paris has made the debatable boast of being the most beautiful city in the world. Beautiful for the harmony of its buildings and bustling streets, with enticing food stores, restaurants, museums... Turning it into a kind of Green Mansions with cycles, e-scooters, novelty stalls and street food stalls is, without wishing to sound hysterical, little short of a crime against beauty.
It’s not perfect but better than market street I guess… my daughter just went to Paris and liked it a lot! And she also liked what the city of Toulouse is doing with pedestrian friendly zones! We should learn from success 😊
I really shouldn't knock pedestrian-friendly zones: I first encountered them in the Italian city of Ferrara in 2002, and thought "This is what they should be doing in Paris". So, please allow me to be ambivalent and, like Paul Valéry, to think two opposiing things at once.
To an extent isn’t this the “Housing Theory of Everything” strikes again. To me the real key component of what closing off Market Street didn’t work as intended is your point about the lack of mixed use development. If there were actual residents living these areas then a lot of these stores would have remained open and the ones that didn’t survive would attract new businesses better suited to serve local residents.
I’m reading this thinking San Francisco Centre should absolutely become multi family housing. I know, I know very difficult to do and very costly. But you know with the exception of maybe Manhattan South if 125th street there may not be a place in America where super expensive construction costs are still worth it given the extreme high demand for housing and land costs.
Also, this is the part I’m not sure of. Shouldn’t SB79 be very conducive to apartment conversions in this stretch precisely because of the variety of bus stops on Market Street. In theory shouldn’t the law pre-empt the usual white haired residents showing up to protest changing “historic” San Francisco Centre and the shadows people will bring that will block tomato gardens?
I don’t know why, but San Francisco seems to hate new mixed-use development (they don’t really seem to like any development). While Mission St, Geary, Noe Valley and other neighborhoods have had mixed residential and retail for a long time, look at all the people opposed to the new Marina Safeway mixed-use project.
There's nothing worse than "old lady nimby environmentalists"; they don't care about young people's needs and they want nothing to be built.
A number of American cities tried banning automobile traffic from their main shopping streets in the 1960s. It was thought that if traffic could be directed to parking garages on streets parallel to the main street the shops on the main street could better compete with the new malls. In those cities with which I am familiar this policy backfired and hastened the decay of downtown shopping. It is interesting to me that Austin, where I now live, has reinvigorated its downtown retail by building many residential condos and apartments downtown. Also, I recently visited Paris. At least in the parts of Paris which I frequented, automobile traffic was not constrained on the grand boulevards. The areas where the streets had been closed to auto traffic tended to be small and narrow streets in high pedestrian traffic areas. Apparently, from reading the other comments here, this is not the case throughout the city.
The urbanist movement against the tyranny of the personal automobile of the 00s and 10s was mostly good, in the general sense that urban areas shouldn't be subservient to the needs of cars, their high speed throughput, and parking.
However, the uncompromising progressive spirit leading this charge here brought with it some baggage that threatens to ruin the whole project; namely that (1) resources are infinite, if you can beat them out of billionaires, (2) if something is good, more of it is gooder and (3) once you call something a right, it's non-negotiable.
This meant that if deprioritizing cars is good, eliminating them was better; further, that pedestrians and cyclists had rights to their own cordoned off spaces (after all, anything less is an assault on their safety and humanity).
What you got was complicated, expensive street design that was off-putting and inflexible, engineered to great complication but unable to accommodate the complexity of a messy human place.
The best streets are not like this. They are not rigidly engineered. Cars are allowed, but move slowly because there's too much chaos for them to do anything else. Value is captured, throughput is deprioritized (that's what roads and freeways are for, not streets).
They don't seem to realize that the city center needs to be accessible to people from surrounding areas, not just people who live there. Driving in central SF is a nightmare, but it's light years better than public transit. Getting from the Marina to downtown is a 20 minute drive to cover only 3 miles, but public transit is an insane 40 minutes and two busses.
Getting there from an actual suburb is insanity. I commuted from San Mateo to the Mission for a bit and was lucky enough to be a 5 min walk from BART. By public transit it was drive 5-10 mins to the cal train, switch to the BART at Millbrae, and take it to 24th and mission. I did it exactly once and never again. As bad as sitting in 101 traffic 10 times a week is, it's a picnic compared to public transit.
Unless a dense and reliable transit system is built from the surrounding suburbs into the city all plans to get cars out of downtown will fail miserably.
The progressive mind is not dissimilar to the socialist mind. That government knows best and can impose policies that are best for citizens. Sounds good, right? But it fails more often than it succeeds.
I am not saying you shouldn’t have civic planning. But trying to impose an anti-car policy to meet your goal of preventing global warming is way more complicated than improving traffic flow. The idea that closing Market Street to autos will somehow save the planet from global warming is on a level of self-conceit that you can impose your will on people. That is not how humans behave.
Which brings me to the problem with socialism and progressivism. The attempt to manage how humans behave because you know best. This is how socialism ends up killing millions. How it has to be imposed at the end of the gun. It is a kind of hubris and completely forgets that humans are individuals. Behave as individuals.
The point was to try to create a better urban experience but a lot got in the way (crime, the pandemic and the rise of remote work that made office only downtown areas less viable) Good old capitalism got us there and good old capitalism will get us back 😎
We are in agreement. Someone will see an opportunity, make an investment, and likely get a sweet deal on their lease. Government cannot do that.
No govt cannot do that. It would seem that the government believes it can, however. Hubris, which is the problem when they start planning.
Pedestrianization can work pretty well when it's implemented carefully with consideration for all the relevant stakeholders. They'll never turn Time Square back into an intersection. Unfortunately the progressives have been infected with lazy thinking and belief they can just ram things through.
Before I respond, I need to know: how in hell did you survive elementary and middle school with the name Poopersen? It must have been hell.
I think it is very common now in cities to have some streets as walking streets. It encourages bars, restaurants, and retail stores. But we have also seen streets that still allow cars to thrive. I wonder what their goal was in eliminating car traffic? The streets that are walk-only are not usually 6 lanes wide or major throughfares.
I'm not going to post my unhinged takes under my real name.
Exactly people just can’t ram things through. That’s what I like about the book Abundance.. it’s written by liberals/progressives but it’s full of examples where they could not just do things… much less ram things through. If nothing else we need zoning and permitting reform, and an end to NIMBYism 😎
Seems to me that online shopping also has a lot to do with Market Street’s demise. This is true for retail areas everywhere.
I love pedestrian-only shopping areas. They need to be vehicle-free, with additional restrictions on bicycle use (bike lanes, for example). I normally walk distracted from my surroundings (looking at storefront signs and shop windows, navigating on my cell phone, checking texts, email, Google Maps, etc.). I have enough difficulty avoiding bumping into other pedestrians. The last thing I need is to worry about being hit by an Uber/Lyft, taxi, delivery truck, or trolley.
The best pedestrian-only shopping streets have alleyways behind the stores and restaurants that face the pedestrian-only zone to allow for deliveries and trash collection.
This post of Noah's reminds me of Ryan Puzycki's recent post on what Montreal got right about car-free streets –
https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/paved-for-people
"The borough government designated a stretch of Mont-Royal" Avenue as closed to car traffic to make more open-air social and commercial space during COVID "but, notably, did not simply close the Avenue. They hired architecture firm Intégral Jean Beaudoin to holistically rethink this new public space, incorporating seating, public art, and greenery into the design."
"Local merchant sentiment is generally net-positive: a 2024 survey found that 43% of merchants saw sales rise during pedestrianization, while 30% experienced a decline, generally businesses that were car-dependent or lacked patio dining. The more telling number is commercial vacancy, which fell from 14.5% along Mont-Royal in 2018 to 5-to-6% by 2023."
I don't get down to Wall Street much, but the last time I was there, it seemed more vibrant than ever. Despite Jamie Dimon's best efforts, a lot of New Yorkers still work remotely, or hybrid. It would be weird if Market Street was a ghost town due to a car ban.
It helps that Wall Street is effectively free of motor vehicle traffic, and has been that way for like two decades prior to the pandemic. Market Street still has transit, trucks, and taxis, and the restrictions were introduced At the start of the pandemic.
Basically what Noah said. The level of motor vehicle traffic still allowed was still too much, and the timing was bad.
Market street has always been a bit of a dump - since I first started going to SF many decades ago. Soma used to be no man’s land (after dark). The development of Mission and SOMA for the tech companies and some of their workers helped boost its prospects for a time (though I never could understand why people would pay crazy rents to live there as opposed to half as much, pre-AI, in I/O Richmond or Sunset)
The financial district on the other side is what long kept Market alive (pre-tech), and that has shrunken quite a bit. Really no need to have big teams in downtown SF. California St. isn’t so bad, though and the Ferry building (really about tourists and socializing now rather than workers) has been a bright spot.
There is just zero need for a commercial street along Market. Mission and California and environs have enough commercial to meet the demands of the dwindling supply of workers. And you make good points about the banning of cars accelerating the demise of Market.
However, with both the financial district and union square being shadows of their former selves (and tech traffic on Mission not rebounding to pre-Covid levels) there is really no need for market street to be anything but a conduit for traffic and the homeless.
This is a depressing and pessimistic view - there is tons of housing along this corridor, that if it was clean and safe and accessible with cars, people would gladly live there. That would bring shops and restaurants and other businesses back!
I heard an interesting story from a business owner in the Dogpatch about how he moved from Union Square 10 years ago because rents were getting too high, and so he bought a place cheaply. Now, the Dogpatch is booming, and the startups are taking cheap space in Union Square. It goes in cycles!
Cars never made sense on Market Street, because of the way it gashes through the street grid. Transit vehicles that just go on a straight line down the whole street are fine, and cars or delivery vehicles that do a right turn onto the street, and a right turn off of it at the next intersection are fine. But anyone trying to cross it and doing a left turn causes problems for everyone.
I am deeply interested in these posts, I love reading about a city's problems, its historical causes and impact, and the possible solutions. I look forward to the post about why San Francisco crime went down.
Write what you know and all that, but I'd be interested in posts about other cities in the US or even across the world, focusing on what works and what doesn't. The dive into Tokyo's mixed-use urbanism was one I enjoyed reading.
Spoiler alert: Flock cameras
Yes, I noticed that too! I recently saw on the news that crime rates seem to be dropping not just in SF, but nationwide across the US. This definitely deserves a deep, thorough look, and I really hope to read an objective, high-quality analysis on it soon.
Seriously, if independent, rigorous scholars don't speak up and present the facts, politicians from every side will just try to claim all the credit for their own agendas.
This seems like yet another scenario where policy analysis was downed by 'aspirational ideology', the idea — seductive to both parties — that if you just prioritize enough Good Things Whose Goodness Is Arrived At Moral-Heuristically, this will magically translate to better outcomes. But this is a lot like trying to draft a basketball team because Making Three Point Shots Is Good, and thereby ignoring Bam Adebayo and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Great post! The 'thoroughfare vs. destination' distinction is vital to avoid making this type of mistake.
Someone should go through and tally up how much money has been lost in total by Americans assuming Europe is the same as America and Europeans assuming America is just like Europe. SF's misapplication of Paris's LTZ can be added to the list of previous failures such as, Tesco misunderstanding the US supermarket shopper with its Fresh & Easy US launch in 2007 (-£2bn) or UK telecoms companies like NTL getting the US cable-TV model the wrong way round when laying fibre-optic cable infrastructure (- £25bn).
I don't think it matters how many cars you allow on the street if there's nothing to visit in the first place. Some places in the Bay Area where pedestrianization has worked out are downtown Sunnyvale and Mountain View. In Sunnyvale they only closed off one street, but it's fully closed off to vehicles. They also added some plaza space where they have events, and temporarily close some streets for slightly larger events.
Mountain View closed off Castro Street to all vehicles going down the length of the street, though cars can pass over it. All of the parking lots/garages were never directly accessible from Castro Street anyway, and the reclaimed space can actually be used by pedestrians/restaurants for seating. Personally I find the space to be much more vibrant and inviting.
Not sure if there's a take away for Market Street specifically, but it does show that pedestrianization can work, even in a highly car oriented area. Just need to make sure the implementation is right.
You must have many, widely distributed mixed-use residential apartments and condos, along with pedestrian walkways, dedicated bike paths, and landscaped parks to create safe, inviting, lively and unique neighborhoods. Many eyes on the street, pedestrians outnumbering motorists, and autonomous vehicles can help make it safer. Americans, their vehicles and cities are in transition.