I took my first post-vaccination trips in April and May, traveling twice to New Orleans. I’d been in New Orleans quite a number of times over the years but, for one reason or another, hadn’t been there since 1983. The city has changed in many ways since then. It’s been through a couple of major disasters, and it’s made a fairly serious attempt to make itself even more congenial to both tourists and its middle-class inhabitants. Much of what it’s done has involved improving transit and pedestrian facilities, or at least seeming to do so. Let me explain, starting with the disasters.

New Orleans’ first urban disaster was of course Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Much of the city flooded, 1800 people died, and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed. Katrina affected different parts of the city to differing extents.  Much of the worst damage occurred in relatively poor neighborhoods. The French Quarter, downtown New Orleans, and the generally prosperous neighborhoods just inland from the Mississippi upriver from downtown, all of which sit on a natural levee, were largely spared. ¹ Sixteen years later, much has been repaired or rebuilt, but large parts of the city are still rather empty.

The second, much more local urban disaster occurred more recently. In 2019, a Hard Rock Hotel under construction at the northern end of downtown on the corner of Rampart and Canal Streets collapsed. The collapse damaged a substantial area, which remains largely off-limits to passersby. The Hard Rock Hotel collapse was of course a disaster on a much smaller scale than Katrina, but it’s had a significant effect on New Orleans. It’s interfered with a long-standing effort to extend the bustling and respectable part of downtown New Orleans northward, and it’s caused a major interruption of New Orleans’ public transit system, notably all of its newest streetcar lines.

It’s hard to talk about New Orleans without acknowledging a much more slow-moving urban failure, one that’s been taking place over something like the last century and a half. New Orleans’ old role as the major port on the Gulf of Mexico and the Lower Mississippi has been eroding for a long time.² Other cities’ ports have been competing successfully with New Orleans’, and, even if they hadn’t done so, port activities, increasingly automated, just don’t provide as significant an underpinning for a large urban area as they did in the past. Hosting corporate headquarters (among other activities) plays a much larger role in ensuring prosperity, but this is not one of New Orleans’ strengths. Much of Louisiana’s oil industry is administered from Houston and elsewhere.

As a result, New Orleans, once one of the most important urban nodes in the United States, has slowly been transformed into a somewhat marginal place. New Orleans was the largest city in the American South for the century and a quarter starting with 1820.³ It was the third-largest city in the country in 1840 and the center of the fifth most populous urban area in 1830 and 1840.⁴ New Orleans has been sinking down the American urban hierarchy ever since. It lost its status as the largest Southern city (and urban area) to Houston in 1950, and New Orleans’ relative decline has continued in the decades since. By 2019, fifteen Southern cities had larger populations than the city of New Orleans, which ranked only 50th in the country. Similarly, fourteen urban areas in the South were larger. The New Orleans MSA ranked 47th in the U.S. in 2019. Competing Southern urban areas like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta, are now three or four times as populous. Hurricane Katrina obviously didn’t help, but New Orleans’ relative decline goes back many decades.

New Orleans is hardly the only city in the world to suffer a long-term loss of relative status as a result of powerful historical forces. Perhaps this is the eventual fate of most cities when the original reasons for their growth cease to matter as much. In the modern world, many such cities—especially those with a rich architectural and cultural heritage—have found it advantageous to focus increasingly on tourism and the improvement of local living conditions in order to mitigate decline. Classic examples of such places are Venice and Kyoto. New Orleans has followed a similar path. Much of New Orleans’ planning in recent years has aimed to make the city an even more congenial place for tourists, educated locals, and students.

Public transit and pedestrian facilities are among the urban components most affected by government efforts to support tourism and a pleasant lifestyle.

One of New Orleans’ tourist attractions for many decades has been the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar line. The line, which uses original, early 20th-century rolling stock, runs between Canal Street and Carrollton via the Garden District.

Adding additional lines increasingly seemed a good idea starting in the 1980s.⁵ Depending on how one counts them, three, four, or five additional lines have been built: the River Line along the Mississippi between the French Market and the Convention Center (1988); a Canal Street line between the River and the cemeteries at the southern edge of the middle-class neighborhoods along Lake Pontchartrain (2004) (with a branch to the City Park); and short lines parallel to the Mississippi along Loyola Avenue to the Amtrak Station and along Rampart Street on the northern edge of the French Quarter (2013 and 2016 respectively). All the new lines use new rolling stock designed to look old.

They also all replicate an additional feature of the Saint Charles line: they run quite slowly, in part because they make frequent stops and in part because they do not make use of signal preemption. They are most definitely not modern light rail lines, although the River Line has its own right-of-way along railroad tracks, and the Canal Street lines run along a central median (the “neutral ground” in New Orleans English).⁶ A cynic might argue that they were built as much to enhance New Orleans’ image as to facilitate transportation. Of course, antique streetcars lumbering along at twelve miles an hour—like the streetcars in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—are indeed exceptionally charming, and, after all, New Orleans’ economic health is intimately connected with its ability to delight tourists. A city planner concerned with modal split might, however, note that these streetcars don’t make a very good case to locals who would otherwise be tempted to use them to get to work. It should go without saying that, if more New Orleanians took streetcars to work, the city would generate fewer tons of the greenhouse gases that are causing changes in the climate that probably pose a greater threat to New Orleans than to any other American city.

Unfortunately, the Hard Rock Hotel disaster damaged the tracks, so that, when I was in New Orleans, the Rampart Street line and the western half of the River Line weren’t running at all.

Lower Canal Street was being served by the River Line, and the Canal Street City Park line was only going as far south as Basin Street, while the Canal Street Cemeteries line was turning onto the tracks to the Amtrak Station. Whereas the Saint Charles line was running every ten minutes or so for much of the day and attracting a fair number of riders, all the other lines were operating only at something like every half hour and sometimes running pretty empty. No doubt the scarcity of tourists during the Covid-19 Pandemic was a factor here, as was the fact that passengers from the north needed to make an awkward connection on Canal Street. I don’t know when or if service on these lines will be restored to its pre-Pandemic pattern.

Additions to New Orleans’ streetcar lines have occurred at more or less the same time as additions to its pedestrian facilities, whose beneficiaries are local residents as much as tourists.

New Orleans in fact has had one distinctive type of pedestrian facility for decades. The levees along the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, built to protect the city from water, turned out (as in some other parts of the world) to be excellent places for walking and running. My memory from the 1980s is that at least some of the pedestrian paths on levees were essentially dirt jeep trails, built originally for maintenance workers. One of the byproducts of post-Katrina levee strengthening has been that many levees have acquired paved paths, often endowed with some of the amenities found along many of the world’s more carefully maintained recreational paths: lane stripes, distance markers, streetlights, trash cans, and even a few benches.

In some cases, these levees go on for a very long distance, out into the suburbs and beyond. The longest is surely the Mississippi River Trail on the west (i.e., southern) bank that passes through Algiers, across the River from downtown. Because of the path’s length and newish pavement, it’s become as much a bicycle path as a pedestrian trail, but pedestrians certainly do use the path.

There are also substantial recreational paths on levees along Lake Pontchartrain in the northern part of the city and its Jefferson Parish suburbs as well as upriver (north, roughly) from Audubon Park on the east bank. Because there are still some port facilities and warehouses occupying stretches of these levees, connecting paths in a few cases have even been constructed below the levees to assure a continuous bicycling/running/walking surface.

The central part of New Orleans, although on higher ground than most outlying neighborhoods and suburbs, is also protected in part by levees as well as by a concrete wall, but it used to be that, because the port was adjacent to downtown, it wasn’t easy for anyone except port workers to get to the Mississippi. Most of the port’s activities, however, have moved to new container facilities up- and downriver, and the city has been able to redevelop much of the downtown waterfront. Some of the old industrial buildings and warehouses have been replaced by hotels and a casino while others have been kept and repurposed as apartment buildings and (again) hotels. The riverfront itself has gained a  3500-feet (1 km)-long walkway, the Moonwalk, that begins more or less at the foot of Canal Street. The Moonwalk (named after Mayor Moon Landrieu and sometimes spelled Moon Walk) and the adjoining Woldenberg Park date in part back to the 1970s but were considerably improved after the (financially disastrous) 1984 World’s Fair and renovated again in 2018.⁷

More recently and downriver (east, roughly) from the French Quarter, across the tracks from Bywater, a 1.25 mile (2 km) linear park—Crescent Park—has been built (2014). It provides a great recreational path that features wonderful views of the river. It’s accessed by two distinctive bridges (one with elevators).

There’s a parking lot and dog park at the downriver (northeastern) end. It’s possible that the separation of Crescent Park from the city by active train tracks creates some problems. It was quite rainy on one of the days I was there, and I was the only person in the park and wondered how safe it was.

The city has also created the 3-mile (5 km)-long Lafitte Greenway (2012-2015), a recreational path that takes you from Tremé, just north of the French Quarter, to Bayou Saint John, just south of City Park.

The Greenway essentially replaced the Corondolet Canal and parallel railroad tracks that once connected the French Quarter with points north, including Lake Pontchartrain. It’s a fairly conventional, somewhat narrow recreational path. Unlike the other new facilities mentioned here, the Lafitte Greenway takes you away from the gentrified, tourist-friendly parts of New Orleans. The neighborhoods through which it runs are all modest and suffered some damage from Katrina. The path is said to have a crime problem, which the authorities have dealt with by installing cameras and emergency telephones. The Lafitte Greenway also has some awkward street crossings.

Note that all three of New Orleans’ newer recreational paths—the Moonwalk, Crescent Park, and the Lafitte Greenway—are rather short. They are dwarfed in extent by the older levees, but, unlike the levees, they do all serve the central city at least in part.

Even without special facilities like the Lafitte Greenway and Crescent Park, central New Orleans is, of course, a reasonably congenial place for pedestrians, if only because it has such a high density of interesting architecture. There’s a swath around seven miles (11 km) long (but less than a mile—1.6 km—wide) that curls along the Mississippi from Bywater to Carrollton whose built form dates essentially to the late 19th and very early 20th centuries that’s just about all quite pedestrian-friendly (and prosperous). The core neighborhood of this zone, the French Quarter, surely has a higher building density than anyplace else in the American South, and even the more bucolic Garden District has an extraordinary variety of close-together structures that are a great pleasure to walk through.

The quality of sidewalks, however, is an issue just about everywhere in New Orleans. In New Orleans’ greener areas, there’s usually a narrow strip between the sidewalk proper and the street, and the semi-tropical vegetation planted in this area (and sometimes on the sidewalk’s other edge as well) often plays havoc with concrete sidewalk slabs, and you have to watch where you’re going. Also, even modest rainfall can overwhelm the sewers and turn the sidewalks into ponds.

The problematic sidewalks are surely one of the reasons why so many people walk and run in the right-of-way of the Saint Charles streetcar line—one of New Orleans’ most exotic sights! The ground is flat here, and you’re much less likely to trip than on the regular sidewalks. You do have to watch out for streetcars, but, since they move so slowly, this is not a major issue.

Several of the other wider streets in central New Orleans also have parkland in the middle of the street that has come to be used over the years by people walking and running. Paved sidewalks have been added to several of the medians in recent years, for example along Francis Parkway in Mid-City. One would think there would be problem with cross streets when one walks along the “neutral ground,” but, in fact, since New Orleans drivers can’t be counted on to yield to pedestrians crossing streets from traditional sidewalks, this may not be a major disadvantage. Pedestrians traversing street medians are more visible than those on sidewalks.

New Orleans’ dilapidated sidewalks suggest that the city has not prioritized good pedestrian infrastructure along its streets. It’s possible that this simply reflects local preferences. I was struck on my recent trips to New Orleans by the fact that there weren’t all that many pedestrians in residential neighborhoods and on recreational paths. I was often all by myself on New Orleans’ distinctive streets. Even on the new or newish recreational paths, I sometimes had to wait a long time if I wanted to include people in the photographs I took. The Lafitte Greenway seems to be especially underused. You do see more people walking (and bicycling) on the streets and paths of middle-class neighborhoods in New Orleans than in analogous parts of, say, Atlanta or Dallas, but New Orleans, despite high walk scores in many places, never seems all that bustling, except in the most touristy areas (like the upriver—southwestern—end of Bourbon Street in the French Quarter).⁸

One factor here is that, despite their high building density, New Orleans’ inner-city neighborhoods often have only middling-high population densities. This should not be surprising. Residential structures may be close together, but probably most are single-family houses, and there are only a tiny number of tall buildings. Most census tracts in the gentrified neighborhoods along Saint Charles Avenue have population densities of between 3,000 and 5,000 people per square kilometer. This is high by American standards but would be low in much of, say, New York or even Chicago.

Because of New Orleans’ modest population densities, the streets can accommodate automobiles more easily than one might expect in a city whose built form has its roots in many respects in the late 19th century. And, in fact, the statistics on modal choice suggest that, however much New Orleans may dote on its streetcars, the city is very nearly as automobile-oriented as other Southern cities. According to the 2015-2019 American Community Survey, 77.1% of working-age adults in New Orleans got to work by motor vehicle (”car, truck or van”), 6.8% took public transit, and 5.4% walked. The comparable figures for Atlanta are 73.4%, 10.4%, and 5.0%, and for Dallas 87.7%, 3.8%, and 2.1%. In other words, a smaller proportion of the working-age population in famously autocentric Atlanta got to work by car than was the case in New Orleans, and car use in Dallas wasn’t that much higher than in New Orleans.⁹

New Orleans’ autocentric tendencies have been revealed dramatically by the reactions to a recent proposal to pedestrianize a substantial part of the French Quarter.¹⁰

There were the usual protests about closing off automobile access to residents. How could the elderly get to hospitals, it was argued, if they can’t drive?

Of course, any Western European city with a kilometer-square historic center that, like the French Quarter, was much frequented by tourists would have created a largely automobile-free pedestrian zone decades ago, but, well, the French Quarter is in the United States, and public opinion just doesn’t support such a move.¹¹

No doubt the Covid-19 Pandemic colored my impressions of New Orleans this spring, since it caused tourists, office workers, and the city’s many college students to be in short supply. As the Pandemic fades away, perhaps the city will become a little more lively. I certainly hope that that’s the case. As things stand, the southern third of Miami Beach, essentially a 20th-century city, is a much more bustling place than central New Orleans, and, if you judge a recreational path’s success by the number of people it attracts, Miami Beach Walk would have to be considered a more successful recreational path than, say, the Lafitte Greenway.

To sum up, while New Orleans’ streetscape remains extraordinarily distinctive, its citizens’ transportation choices seem to be very much like those made elsewhere in its region. They do not appear to have been much changed by the slow improvements in New Orleans’ rail-transit and pedestrian infrastructure.