New York’s “open streets” vs. Chicago’s “shared streets”

I’ve reported in previous blog posts (here and here) on Chicago’s “shared streets” (which are comparable to what are called “slow streets” in most other cities). These are streets open only to local motor-vehicle traffic and intended chiefly for pedestrian and bicycle use. Slow streets (under any name) are one of the innovations of the Pandemic; they came into being as a result of a perceived need for socially-distanced recreational space. On the basis of what I’ve seen in Chicago, I’ve been pretty skeptical about slow streets. Many drivers have been failing to heed the signs directing them to drive slowly. Perhaps as a result (or because of force of habit) few pedestrians have been using Chicago’s shared streets. There may have been a slight reduction in traffic on these streets, and cyclists using them have been taking advantage of the implicit permission on one-way shared streets to travel in the wrong direction (something a lot of cyclists do anyway), but it’s been a little hard to see the point otherwise. Shared streets seemed to be one more well-meaning but somewhat futile attempt to tame automobiles.

I recently visited three of what are called “open streets” in New York and was struck by how much more successful—by how much more used—they (and especially one of them) seemed to be than Chicago’s shared streets.

In this blog post, I report my observations of and some hypotheses about the differences between New York’s and Chicago’s slow streets. I hope someone somewhere is working on a more deeply researched scholarly study.

The streets I visited in New York were Avenue B between East 6th Street and East 14th Street on the Lower East Side (or maybe East Village, in any case Manhattan); Berry Street between North 12th Street and Broadway in Williamsburg (Brooklyn); and 34th Avenue between 69th Street and Junction Boulevard in Jackson Heights (Queens). Note that these are three out of what, at the height of the Pandemic, were hundreds of open streets in New York.

Map of parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens showing the location of the “open streets” mentioned in the text. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. They have been edited quite a lot.

The three open streets are rather different from each other.

It wasn’t even clear from the 14th Street end that the Avenue B open street was still functioning (although it’s supposed to be), since the traffic barrier wasn’t there, and several trucks were parked for unloading on this block. This northernmost block of Avenue B was very much like Leland Avenue in Chicago: the fact that it was supposed to be an open street was being more or less ignored by at least some drivers, and there weren’t any pedestrians in the street. (The fact that it was a weekday morning when I was there may have been a factor.)

Traffic on Avenue B, a theoretically open street, just south of 14th Street.

There were barriers on the other cross-streets, from 13th Street south; there was less traffic; and there were a few pedestrians and cyclists in the roadway.

Pedestrians on Avenue B between 10th and 11th Streets, Lower East Side. On the left are examples of the outdoor-eating sheds that have replaced parking lanes in front of thousands of New York restaurants.

Berry Avenue in Williamsburg (probably a much more lightly used street pre-Pandemic) was doing better. Although some of the barriers here too were missing, there was little traffic, and there were several people walking or cycling on the street.

Cyclist apparently carrying freight and dogwalkers on Berry Street, Williamsburg.

34th Avenue in Jackson Heights was a different kind of place altogether. All the barriers here were firmly in place and installed in locations that would make any driver think twice about entering the street in a car.

Signs discouraging automobile entry to the 34th Avenue open street. New York’s street barriers are generally shorter than those in Chicago, but, when installed properly, block the street more effectively.

And (more important) many more people were walking—and relaxing and playing—on 34th Avenue.

People walking and bicycling along 34th Avenue, Jackson Heights.

One block was more or less permanently closed and had been turned into supervised playspace.

Playspace along 34th Avenue.

A couple of street vendors were sure enough that they’d get some business that they set up at cross-streets.

Street vendor, cyclists, and pedestrians at 34th Avenue and 93rd Street.

A few people felt so confident that they would not be bothered by cars that they were sitting in the median of 34th Avenue with their legs dangling in the street.

People walking along and sitting on the median of 34th Avenue.

And, in fact, there were virtually no cars moving on 34th Avenue (although there were some scooters and motorcycles). The couple of cars I saw weren’t there to go through: they were parking.

I’m hardly the first person to be impressed by the 34th Avenue open street. It’s been held up widely as a model and gotten an enormous amount of positive publicity. Figuring out why it’s worked so well seems worthwhile.

One hypothesis: There has been much more community involvement in the maintenance of some open streets than others, and this involvement has been as strong on 34th Avenue as anywhere. One reason why community members had to become involved was that New York’s open streets in most cases have been operative only between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. (Chicago’s shared streets have been in force 24/7). The fact that the New York open streets have been only part-time has meant that someone has had to put out the barriers every morning and remove them every evening. At first, this task fell to New York’s Department of Transportation, which has a great many other duties. In some cases (including on 34th Avenue), volunteers started maintaining the barriers and eventually acquired a role as vocal supporters of the street as well. In New York, some of the open streets where no members of the community became involved in maintenance have ceased to exist as the Pandemic has receded.¹ Chicago’s shared streets, in contrast, have required only modest maintenance, and, in so far as I know, there has been little formal community involvement in their establishment and upkeep, which (like many things in Chicago) have been left to the local aldermen.

There’s another likely reason for the relative success of New York’s open streets. The New York neighborhoods being considered here are fundamentally different from the Chicago neighborhoods where shared streets have been put. New York’s are all denser—and have lower levels of automobile ownership. New York inner-city neighborhoods, by American standards, are spectacularly high-density and carfree. The table below gives figures for the census tracts that enclose part of or border on the three New York open streets I’m considering in this post and the Leland Avenue shared street in Chicago, as currently constituted.²

Because car owners are a minority in high-density New York, the interests of carfree households count for a great deal more than they do elsewhere in urban North America. Perhaps as a result, New York has done more than other large American cities to reduce the role of the automobile in urban movement. These days, there are more than a thousand miles of bike lanes on the streets of New York (including protected lanes in many cases); some streets (Broadway in part of Manhattan, for example) have been put on a stringent “diet”; thousands of restaurants have voluntarily given up their parking lanes to build outdoor eating sheds; and traffic lights increasingly give pedestrians several seconds to start crossing streets before automobiles are allowed through. New York’s large-scale open-streets program, which appears to be supported by the majority of the population, is one more manifestation of this pattern. Open streets have been a success in part because there were a great many people living nearby who did a lot of walking or bicycling every day and found the streets useful and attractive. As a result, car drivers stayed away. This encouraged more pedestrians and cyclists to use the streets. In other words, a positive cumulative causation process made the streets the bustling places that many of them are today.

Chicago (and numerous other American cities) have, like New York, moved to reduce automobile usage in recent years but generally in a much more half-hearted way. Chicago, for example, has set up a bike-share program and built some bike lanes (including a small number of protected lanes), and, of course, it’s started a small shared-streets program, but it hasn’t done much besides that to reduce the role of automobiles in the city. There are certainly many people in Chicago who are unhappy about this, but politicians, as always, listen to those who are most numerous and shout loudest. Chicago has hundreds of thousands of carfree households (including many in well-off areas), but the majority of households in Chicago do include a car, and car owners know how to shout.⁷ One shared street in Chicago—Dickens Avenue—was abandoned, because local car-owners hated it and said so. Chicago hasn’t been able to prevent drivers from going too fast on its other shared streets, because drivers are used to doing what they want. As a result, none of the city’s shared streets is used very intensively, a fact that makes fast driving on these streets all the more likely. Because of the relatively low density of Chicago’s neighborhoods (and the lower density of carfree households), there just aren’t enough people around who could fight back. A truly effective slow-street program would perhaps require disciplining automobile use much more completely than is now politically possible in Chicago. The city’s car-ownership levels may just be too high for this to happen.

There are some other plausible (and to some extent interrelated) hypotheses that could be used to explain the particular success of the 34th Avenue open street. Jackson Heights is the only one of the neighborhoods considered here that could be labeled “working-class,” although, as in many New York neighborhoods—thanks to rent control and very high housing costs for newcomers—its inhabitants have a wide range of incomes. Its household size is also larger than that of the other neighborhoods, and it has a higher proportion of children. In addition, it’s further from a major park. For all these reasons, there may simply be more need for open space in Jackson Heights than in the other neighborhoods. The crowds you see using 34th Avenue had no other place to go.

What will happen to the slow streets is not yet clear. The Pandemic seems to be receding, and the CDC has declared that social-distancing outdoors is not as important as was once believed. It may be that the need for slow streets is fading away. But New York’s government has decided to continue to maintain some open streets in one form or another, and, in fact, the 34th Avenue open street has recently been made permanent by the City Council, although the details remain to be determined (some have proposed turning the street into a linear park). The future of shared streets in Chicago is unclear. It’s probably significant that only a few of the shared streets established in 2020 were revived in 2021.

There are some (admittedly rather obvious) lessons to be drawn here. One is that slow streets can be more meaningful than they have been in Chicago. Another is that community organizations and organizers really can effect change. There is also the very basic fact that reducing the role of automobiles in cities is a lot more likely to be successful in a city where only a minority of the population owns one.

I was having camera problems on my July 2021 trip to New York and illustrated the original version of this post with iPhone photos. In August 2021 I replaced some of these with photos made with a repaired camera on another trip to New York.