I spent a few days in the Dallas area earlier this month. It was my first time in Dallas since February 1997. On that earlier trip, I’d found the city deeply depressing. Dallas’s downtown, once apparently a lively place, had hardly any pedestrians. It was as if the city were trying to discourage strolling.  Most of the low structures that had once contained ground-floor shops had been replaced by high-rise office buildings, many of which had blank walls rising thirty or forty feet.

Along Olive Street in downtown Dallas.

Even the famous flagship branch of Neiman Marcus felt dingy and deserted. It wasn’t clear that Neiman Marcus wanted people to shop there.

A peculiar feature of downtown Dallas was that it was surrounded in part by huge surface and midrise parking facilities.

Parking facilities, looking east from Harwood Street, downtown Dallas.

Bridges and tunnels connected some of these to the office buildings, but the odd thing was that there were few pedestrians even in these off-street links, perhaps in part because there was little commerce along them. It was hard to believe that Dallas’s bridge and tunnel system had been designed in part by Vincent Ponte, who was also responsible for downtown Montreal’s much livelier underground tunnel system.

Even the neighborhoods surrounding downtown seemed pretty dead. There were hardly even any dog walkers, and the narrow pedestrian path I discovered along Turtle Creek just north of downtown had no users.

I acknowledge, of course, that people who find it normal to interact with the world only through the windows of an automobile might not have shared my opinion.

The one feature of Dallas that made a positive impression in 1997 was the just-opened first line of its light-rail system, run by DART, the local transit agency. This new line connected Lovers Lane, a mostly commercial district perhaps six miles (10 km) north of the CBD, with modest neighborhoods southwest of the CBD. The line passed through downtown along a surface street reserved for light-rail vehicles.  The system’s most distinctive component was a mile-long subway section northeast of downtown, which included a station more than a hundred feet (30 m) below the surface. In a country where new transit lines were typically built as cheaply as possible, this segment seemed especially impressive. But it was clear even in 1997 that DART’s light-rail system wasn’t functioning quite as it was supposed to.  There were a large number of people going for joy rides on Sunday afternoon. On weekdays DART’s initial light-rail line had few riders.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that in Dallas, as in many Sunbelt cities, there was at least the beginning of a movement to change the city’s autocentric form. This movement has had many causes. Among them has been a widespread realization that, in having no dense, healthy inner-city neighborhoods, Dallas and other Sunbelt cities were missing something important. There is also the fact that large automobile-oriented urban places inevitably inspire a certain amount of revulsion as levels of congestion and pollution mount and as travel other than by car becomes more and more difficult.

The decision to build the DART light-rail system was an early result of this movement. As has been true everywhere in the United States when new rail lines are proposed, discussions about whether and what to build went on for many years, but, in the end, the voters of Dallas and many of its suburbs elected to tax themselves to construct the largest light-rail system in the United States, and, in the years since 1997, most of the originally planned lines (with a few changes and a great many federal dollars) have actually been constructed. The current system has 93 route miles (150 km); there are also approximately six route miles (10 km) of streetcar lines and something like 82 route miles (132 km) of “commuter” rail lines consisting of two separate routes, both located to a large extent in the neighboring Fort Worth urban area (these lines, despite the use of the term “commuter,” run all day, although with longer headways than the light-rail lines). The light-rail and streetcar lines radiate from downtown in eight or nine directions, reaching points as far as twenty miles (32 km) out.

Map of the Dallas area showing rail lines and pedestrian facilities. The category “Other passenger rail lines” includes two fully grade-separated people movers: the Las Colinas Area Personal Transit system and the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport Skylink. GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve modified the data quite substantially.

Everything now existing (except for one infill station) was built between 1996 and 2016. In other words, while the system wasn’t assembled with Chinese-level speed, construction was pretty rapid by North American standards. Dallas’s light-rail system covers the Dallas area (although not the neighboring Fort Worth area) at least as well as BART, MARTA, and Washington Metrorail (all “heavy-rail” systems) cover their urban areas. And it’s somewhat faster than most new light-rail systems. Stations outside of downtown are spaced fairly far apart (1.4 miles—2.2 km—on average), and there are hardly any places where red lights force trains to stop for cross-traffic (as happens frequently on some light-rail lines in Los Angeles and elsewhere). One reason for this is that a high proportion of track is elevated. There are hundreds of level crossings, but these are mostly protected by formidable crossing gates, and trains generally whiz through them.

The fly in the ointment is that DART has struggled to attract passengers. Only approximately 100,000 people a day have been riding DART’s trains; something like the same number have been taking buses. The figures have fluctuated during the last twenty-five years, but it can’t really be claimed that the trend has been up despite the growth of the system (and, as everywhere, ridership during the Pandemic has plummeted).¹ Census figures confirm that Dallas has remained an automobile-oriented place. According to the 2015/2019 American Community Survey, only 3.8% of workers 16 and over in the city of Dallas used public transit for their journey to work. In the Dallas-Fort Worth urbanized area, the comparable figure was only 1.58%.²

DART’s relative failure to attract riders is rooted in a fundamental geometric problem. Virtually all of Dallas’s growth has occurred during a period when most movement in the area was by automobile. Automobiles work least well when you try to squeeze a large number of them into the same area, and so, as in all automobile-oriented cities, important destinations in the Dallas area are spread widely. Train lines, in contrast, work most efficiently when many people using them are going to the same places. Without changing the geography of destinations, train lines fit the automobile city awkwardly; they just don’t go to as large a proportion of significant places as one might like. There’s also inevitably a difficulty simply in getting people to stations in an automobile-oriented city. Walking to the stations through an environment hostile to pedestrians is unattractive for most people. Outlying stations in the DART system do mostly have parking lots, but not everyone has access to a car, and, even if they do, many people find the idea of shifting from car to train mid-trip unappealing. I can’t resist adding that the twenty-minute headways on all the outer branches probably don’t encourage ridership either.³

Despite DART’s failure to attract crowds, there seems still to be considerable support for the agency, and additional lines—a downtown subway and a circumferential line in the northern suburbs—are in the works.

One factor here is, again, surely the major change in Dallas’s attitude toward itself that I mentioned above. Many people in Dallas would like the place to be more like big eastern (or European) cities. In addition to stimulating support for public transit, this desire has led to a substantial and growing interest in making Dallas a bit more “walkable.” According to a survey reported by Strong Towns,⁴ 68% of the people of Dallas would like to live in a walkable neighborhood even though hardly any of them actually do. The absence of walkability in Dallas has become something of an obsession among a certain class of people there. There have been frequent articles in local magazines and newspapers lamenting Dallas’s autocentricity and ranking the walkability of Dallas neighborhoods. If you Google “Dallas” and “walkable,” you get hundreds of hits.⁵

On my recent trip to Dallas, I spent much of my time in Uptown, which is ranked in most surveys as the most walkable of Dallas’s neighborhoods. Uptown is just north of downtown and can easily be reached from downtown on foot (or on the free McKinney Avenue streetcar; it’s also the site of the DART rail system’s only subway stop).

Central Dallas, showing rail lines and pedestrian facilities. See previous map for information on data sources.

Much of Uptown has indeed been built up with somewhat dense housing. This is particularly true of the part of Uptown known as the West Village, where the buildings come right to the sidewalk and include ground-floor shops.⁶

Apartment building in the West Village, Uptown, with a McKinney Avenue streetcar in the foreground.

There are also sidewalk shops and restaurants in the parts of Uptown that are a little less dense, for example along McKinney Avenue south of the West Village area—where they’re still mixed with strip malls! But even here and on minor streets, sidewalks are universal. There are traffic lights at most busy corners that give pedestrians a chance to cross streets. Drivers of turning vehicles seem to respect pedestrians adequately. Walk scores are high by Dallas standards. It’s not easy to define walkability, but, however you do so, Uptown would surely pass muster.

McKinney Avenue street scene, Uptown.

How parts of cities get to be the way they are is always complicated, but it appears that the physical geography of Uptown is largely the creation of real-estate developers and city officials who, for the last thirty or so years, have been pushing to create a walkable neighborhood that would be attractive both to younger professionals and (perhaps) to older “empty-nesters” as well. Except on its eastern and western edges, Uptown is mostly not a neighborhood that underwent more or less simultaneous gentrification and historic preservation, as better-off newcomers fixed up the existing housing stock. Instead, most of the original modest housing was completely obliterated and replaced by apartment buildings.⁷

Central control didn’t disappear when Uptown matured. As in many other successful neighborhoods, Uptown has an active group of business representatives who try to maintain the brand by keeping the streets in good shape and posting consistent signage. Uptown Dallas Inc. is the (appropriate) name of this group in Uptown.

One of the hundreds of consistent street banners in Uptown posted by Uptown Dallas Inc.

It’s unprovable, but it seems likely that active work by real-estate agents has been another factor in supporting the market for Uptown housing units. There are several storefront real-estate shops on or close to McKinney Avenue.

Sign outside a real-estate store on McKinney Avenue.

Whatever the causes, Uptown has been extraordinarily successful in attracting well-off buyers and tenants. According to the 2015/2019 American Community Survey, per capita income in the tracts whose boundaries approximately coincide with Uptown’s vague boundaries was $91,806 a year.⁸ An astonishing 72.9% of the inhabitants of these tracts were between 21 and 39 years old. Median contract rent was $1726, high for Dallas. Uptown is most definitely not an ordinary Dallas neighborhood that happens to be somewhat walkable. It is overwhelmingly a place for relatively privileged, mostly younger professionals.

I was struck when I was there, however, by the fact that, while there certainly are pedestrians in Uptown, the place is not exactly teeming with people on foot. One factor is that, for much of the day, there are a lot of cars around. In fact, there are rivers of traffic on many of the neighborhood’s streets, some of which at any moment are likely to have several dozen cars for every pedestrian. Furthermore, most shops offer plentiful parking, although it can be behind rather than in front of buildings. Dallas’s West Village and the rest of Uptown are not as traffic-ridden as some other parts of Dallas, but they still don’t feel anything like the West Village.

Rivers of traffic on Lemmon Avenue, Uptown. Note the “luxury apartments” sign on the building in the next block.

Uptown  reminded me in some ways of Atlanta’s Midtown, which also advertises its walkability but has huge amounts of traffic—and few pedestrians. Some of the other recently-built pockets of dense, “new urbanist” housing I’ve come across in the Sunbelt and in northern-city suburbs in recent years also seem to have ended up quite automobile-oriented despite being marketed as walkable places.

This appears to be true as well of other inner-city Dallas areas that get put on lists of walkable Dallas neighborhoods. Examples include the Bishop Arts district, which lies at the end of the Dallas streetcar line; Knox-Henderson, the neighborhood just north of Uptown; and parts of Oak Lawn that lie to its west.⁹ There are new mid-rise or even (in places) high-rise apartment buildings in these generally prosperous areas. Walking is possible. It’s just that, in so far as I can see, there aren’t a huge number of people who take advantage of the possibility. The same can probably be said of Deep Ellum, a much grittier neighborhood more or less east of downtown that also makes the walkable lists.

Inventories of walkable neighborhoods in Dallas also typically include many suburban downtowns, some of which are accessible by DART light-rail lines. Most of these are rather small. Irving’s Las Colinas (where there’s even a 1989 people mover) is something of an exception in being quite substantial.¹⁰  There are also numerous apartment complexes—many brand-new—being located near train stations in the Dallas area. I haven’t explored outer Dallas very much at all, and so I hesitate to say a word about the outer-city islands of density. What isn’t in doubt is that walkability in Dallas is perceived by many to be a good thing and that this fact has encouraged real-estate developers to construct denser housing in many places. How much these new construction styles have changed people’s transportation habits isn’t quite clear. I’m inclined to be cynical.

Downtown Dallas is a special case. The blank walls and humongous parking facilities that I noted in 1997 are still there, but there are definitely a few more pedestrians these days than there had been then even though many office workers are presumably still staying home because of the Covid-19 Pandemic. One reason for the greater number of pedestrians than in the past is that there are now quite a number of apartments for rent or sale both in the heart of downtown and along its northern edge. Some of these were carved out of older office buildings and warehouses. But the most visible apartments are in tall (and expensive) buildings that have been constructed recently in and around the Arts District, notably the Museum Tower and Atelier. This area has gotten quite a boost from a major public investment. Two blocks of freeway in a culvert have been covered over, and the freeway’s roof has become Klyde-Warner Park. On nice weekends food trucks flock to this park, and so do people.

Klyde-Warner Park on the northern edge of the Arts District, downtown Dallas. The two tall buildings on the left are apartment buildings.

But hardly anyone was using the park when I passed by on weekdays, and, in general, I wouldn’t say that downtown Dallas was exactly a bustling place. No one would mistake anywhere in downtown Dallas for, say, Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan or North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. There are people around, including a trickle of shoppers and tourists on Main Street and, sometimes, elsewhere. There are also a few dogwalkers, who were definitely not present in 1997. But downtown Dallas still struck me for the most part as a somewhat empty place much of the time. The new apartment buildings come with plenty of parking, so it’s perfectly possible for their inhabitants to go in and out without setting foot on city streets, and I suspect that’s mostly what they do.

There is one place in central Dallas with a huge number of pedestrians, and that’s the Katy Trail,¹¹ a 3.5 mile (5.6 km) rail trail between Victory Park (northwest of downtown’s West End) and the northern end of Knox-Henderson, just south of Southern Methodist University. I’ve rarely seen a recreational trail as crowded as the Katy Trail was late on a couple of warm afternoons when I was in Dallas. While there were plenty of runners and cyclists, more than half the users whenever I was there were walking. I’ve noted the same thing elsewhere in the Sunbelt. It’s possible that this is a function of the fact that neighborhood walking in Sunbelt cities is so difficult.

On the Katy Trail.

For most of its length the Katy Trail consists of two separate paths: a (generally narrower) recycled-rubber track for pedestrians and a (wider) mostly concrete right-of-way open to everyone. Because of this split—and also perhaps because of 10 mph speed limit—there doesn’t appear to be too great a problem having cyclists on the same path as pedestrians.

Users of the Katy Trail can feel surprisingly distant from the (automobile-oriented) city around them. Most cross-streets are bridged. There are only two level crossings, both near the north end of the trail, where substantial signs seem to be quite successful at forcing drivers to cede to pedestrians. The trail has been professionally landscaped, and admiring the vegetation is one of the things many users of the trail do. There’s also usually enough tree cover along the trail to provide some shade during the warm season (the shade, unfortunately, makes it hard to photograph the trail on sunny days). Just beyond the trees are the backs of generally upscale housing, separated from the trail by fences. Adding to the ambience, there are a couple of cafés right next to the Trail. The Katy Trail seems to be perceived in Dallas as being a completely agreeable and utterly safe place. It’s even mentioned in official tourist literature.

There are also other recreational trails in central Dallas, but they get much less use, for various reasons. There are trails, for example, in the Trinity River Valley, which borders downtown, but they aren’t quite continuous, and in places there is little shade. They’re also subject to flooding. The Santa Fe Trail, built like the Katy Trail in a disused railroad right-of-way but much longer, lies to the east and northeast of downtown. It has many more level crossings than the Katy Trail and generally passes through non-upscale neighborhoods, so (fairly or not) it’s not perceived as being completely safe. It attracts users nonetheless. Parallel to the southern end of the Katy Trail, there’s also Turtle Creek Trail, which wanders through an older, more or less traditional city park. The Turtle Creek Trail these days definitely doesn’t receive the same level of maintenance, love, or use as the Katy Trail. There are also numerous recreational trails in northern Dallas, some along waterways, and some built when DART’s rail lines were being constructed.

Dallas has elaborate plans to join its various recreational trails into a more coherent network.¹² Both the city and the county have taken the creation of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure with admirable seriousness. As in some other automobile-oriented cities (Atlanta, for example), there are many people in Dallas who see recreational-trail construction as a way to mitigate some of the negative aspects of its post-World-War-II car-centric morphology. The catch of course is that so many trail users end up having to drive to the trails.

There’s no doubt that Dallas really has changed in some ways since 1997. The creation of DART’s rail lines has made moving around by public transit in the Dallas region faster and more comfortable for thousands of people, and the construction of new recreational trails in the area has enriched the lives of tens and probably hundreds of thousands of people. It would be nice to think that rail-transit and recreational-trail construction and the increasing walkability of a few neighborhoods in the Dallas area had led to an actual decline in the use of automobiles in the region. But it sure doesn’t look to me that there’s much evidence that anything of the sort has actually happened. I acknowledge that a visit of a few days isn’t sufficient to allow anyone to draw completely persuasive conclusions.

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.

A Saint Charles Avenue streetcar runs past one of the many older residential structures on this street.

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.

A River Line streetcar at its temporary terminus in the “neutral ground” (median) of lower Canal Street. Note the large buildings in the background. Many of New Orleans’ taller structures are hotels associated with major chains.

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.

Map of central New Orleans and vicinity, emphasizing streetcar lines and pedestrian facilities (other than sidewalks). GIS data are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve modified the data quite a lot.

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.

The Mississippi River Trail, running on a levee through Algiers Point, Algiers, across the Mississippi from downtown New Orleans, which can be seen in the background.

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 levee trail upriver (north) of Audubon Park as it (temporarily) leaves the levee to bypass a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office built on the levee.

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

The Moonwalk just downriver (northeast) from Canal Street, The bridges in the background are officially known as the Crescent City Connection.

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).

The Piety Street Bridge. which provides access to Crescent Park across heavily used train tracks.

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 Crescent Park trail. The roof shown on the right was once part of a warehouse. It now provides shelter on New Orleans’ frequent rainy days.

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.

Users walking, running, and bicycling on the Lafitte Greenway.

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.

A security camera on the Lafitte Greenway, north of I-10. The busy access road under the freeway is crossed with the help of a flashing yellow streetlight that must be activated by Greenway users.

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.

Runner along the streetcar right-of-way, Saint Charles Avenue.

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.

The recently paved pedestrian path in the middle of Napoleon Avenue, in the Garden District (not shown on map). This path seems to be used only very occasionally.

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

More or less typical cityscape in the French Quarter. The neighborhood, roughly 2700 x 4600 feet (800 x 1400 m), may have more buildings, pedestrians, and cars than in any other similarly-sized space in the American South. Note the dilapidated sidewalks, which are characteristic of a great deal of New Orleans. Here, at least, vegetation is not to blame.

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?

Signs opposing increased pedestrianization in the French Quarter.

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.

Many parks in large American cities seem to be set up more for automobile travel than for getting around on foot or even by bicycle.

An example is Belle Isle Park in Detroit. The park has a very distinguished history. It was designed in part by Frederick Law Olmstead, and it contains several exceptionally attractive older buildings. Its location in the Detroit River guarantees striking views of boat traffic on the river as well as of downtown Detroit and of Windsor, Ontario. But the roads in the park contain at most narrow, cracked sidewalks—and many don’t have sidewalks at all. If you want to walk, or run, in the park, you have to do so either on the grass or in traffic. Full disclosure: I haven’t been in Belle Isle Park since the late 1980s, when I ran from downtown to the park, hoping to find a place that felt like, say, Central Park. I was disappointed, and I’ve never been back. But it looks from a “tour” of the park that I recently made on Google Street View that things haven’t changed much. There are now striped bicycle lanes in some of the main roadways, but the miniscule sidewalks are even more cracked than they were in the 1980s. Of course, the park’s early designers including Olmstead didn’t plan the park to be a place that only automobiles could get around in comfortably—there weren’t any automobiles in the 1880s!—but cars were allowed to take over in the 20th century.

Belle Isle may be an extreme example, but most other big-city parks in the United States have similar issues. As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s nearly impossible in Fairmount Park (Philadelphia) to walk or run anywhere far without spending much of the time along major roads. Golden Gate Park (San Francisco) was (surprisingly) similar until the Pandemic. You couldn’t walk or run the length of the park without following busy roads for much of the way. Places like the Mall in Washington and the Midway in Chicago are even more completely dominated by the several parallel roads that extend their entire length—and cross them at regular intervals.

Only in a few big-city parks—notably Central and Prospect Parks—have some of the roadways been ceded permanently to pedestrians and cyclists. This is mostly a New York phenomenon, however. Elsewhere in the United States, automobile hegemony has generally been too firmly entrenched for change to be conceivable.

This is certainly the case with Chicago’s Lakefront parks. Lake Shore Drive occupies a substantial space along very nearly the entire length of Lakefront parkland. For much of the distance, the park is very narrow, so that park users are never out of sight—and earshot—of a roadway that’s essentially a freeway, even if trucks are banned and there are a couple of traffic lights downtown. It’s possible that no other major city in the world has allowed its most important park to be so completely given over to automobile traffic.

A partial exception occurs in the northeastern part of the North Side’s Lincoln Park, north of Belmont Harbor, and especially north of Montrose Harbor. Here there’s a fairly wide expanse of parkland east of Lakeshore Drive. Lincoln Park north of Belmont Avenue covers an area larger than that of Central Park. The end of the Montrose breakwater is more than a mile on foot or bicycle from Lakeshore Drive. 

The northeastern part of Lincoln Park is a complicated place. It includes two bird sanctuaries, three beaches, two marinas, numerous playing fields, a golf course, perhaps three miles of Army-Corps-of-Engineers-created concrete steps along the shoreline, many acres of traditional grass-and-open-forest parkland, and the Chicago Lakefront’s most substantial hill. As a bonus, the peninsula sticking into the Lake at the latitude of Montrose Avenue provides what is arguably the best view of Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers.

Unfortunately, this part of Lincoln Park also includes a network of roads that has assured that even here park users are hardly ever far from traffic. In summer months, the park north of Montrose has typically been full of cars containing people looking for a place to park or (in some cases) a location in which to set up a barbecuing station. On weekend afternoons, the northeastern part of the park has sometimes felt more like a stadium parking lot on the day of a major game than, well, a park in anything like the traditional sense of the word.

Map of the northern part of Lincoln Park and surrounding city streets. The green lines show paths for pedestrians and cyclists and are only approximate. GIS data are from the Chicago Data Portal and the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; they have been somewhat modified.

This year, however, has been different. Because of the Pandemic, the Lakefront parks east of Lakeshore Drive were closed on March 26 in order to discourage crowding. The Lakefront trails for pedestrians and bicycles—as well as the harbors and the Sydney Marovitz golf course—were reopened on (or just after) June 22 with the proviso that gathering in large groups was forbidden. In practice, the entire park was opened to pedestrians and cyclists, even the substantial areas in the northeast that are quite far from the pedestrian and bicycle trails (the beaches being an intermittently policed exception). Cars, however, were only allowed in the park if drivers could demonstrate that they were going to a marina or to the golf course. Guards enforced the car ban.

As a result, away from the main pedestrian and cycling paths, the northeastern region of the park was startlingly empty of people and cars.



Generally, lots of us—certainly including me—found this absolutely wonderful.


It was possible to get away from the noise and danger of traffic. Chicago’s Lakefront parks had never felt so park-like.

On approximately November 1, while leaving “park closed” signs and some barriers up, the city withdrew the guards who were preventing most cars from entering the park.

Suddenly, the northeastern part of the park was jammed with cars again, at least on weekends. Air quality plummeted. Car-horn honking and motorcycle revving were louder than waves breaking along the shoreline. It became dangerous to walk across the roads.

Of course, I acknowledge that the folks who like to visit the park by car are legitimate stakeholders too, even if their chief goal is to set up barbecue stations. It would be pretty obnoxious to argue that they have no right to use the park (although, as long as the Pandemic continues, it probably makes sense to discourage group activities).

But, still, one does wonder whether there have to be so many cars and so many roads in the northeastern part of the park—and whether the roads need to be quite so wide. Closing off some of the roads and narrowing the others and then substituting vegetation for asphalt would improve the park experience for quite a lot of people.

The question is: have we built elaborate city parks for the convenience and comfort of automobiles, or to allow people to get away from places dominated by the automobile? My guess is that even many drivers would prefer a park that felt a little less like a parking lot.

Note added 15 December 2020. During Thanksgiving week, barriers were put at all road entrances to the northeastern part of Lincoln Park. These made it impossible to drive into the park except across lawns. The barriers have worked quite well. The park is once again an excellent place for socially-distanced car-free recreation.

Note added 19 February 2021. During the week of February 15, the Chicago Park District reopened roads in the northeastern part of Lincoln Park to traffic. This was surely good news for people who wanted drive into the park. It wasn’t good news at all to those of us who’d been enjoying a substantial car-free zone for much of last eight months.

Note added 13 September 2022. Since I wrote the above, Belle Isle has acquired new, striped sidewalks. The view noted above has been changed to this.

There has been talk of building a recreational path along the Chicago River for decades. The Friends of the Chicago River, a lobbying group, has been urging the construction of such a path since its inception in 1979. The second Mayor Daley announced that he favored a path along the North Branch of the River soon after winning his first mayoral election in 1989. The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (at the time the major regional planning agency) proposed a network of “greenways” along many of the Chicago region’s watercourses including the North Branch of the Chicago River in 1992. The city’s Department of Planning and Development announced an official plan to build a path along the river in 1998. And dozens of additional proposals have appeared since the Internet became an important communication medium in the 1990s.

Nearly all these proposals have included two major components: [1] a segment along the river as it runs east-west just north of the Loop proper and also [2] a much longer stretch along the North Branch of the river running the entire length of the North Side. Some proposals have also added a path along the still heavily industrial South Branch of the river.

Underlying these proposals has been a desire to exploit the recreational opportunities along Chicago’s “second coast.” The river valley not only has the potential to furnish a continuous corridor for walking, running, and bicycling. It also includes some underused parkland, and it’s one of the few places in Chicago where there’s visible relief, and hence modest views. There’s even a waterfall (of a sort).

The fact that the Lakefront recreational path has been such an unambiguous success has colored everyone’s thoughts about a Chicago River path. The Lakefront trail not only provides a highly visible model. The fact that it can be dangerously overcrowded suggests the desirability of building additional trails.

One major factor behind the proposals to build a recreational trail along the Chicago River is that northern connections to a North Side trail have existed for decades.

The North Branch Trail, which runs a full twenty miles (32 km) between Devon Avenue and the Chicago Botanic Garden, took shape under the aegis of the Cook County Forest Preserve in the 1970s and was essentially complete by the early 1980s. Plenty of pedestrians use the trail, but, because of its length, they are outnumbered by cyclists except in the depths of winter. It’s probably fair to say that this trail has become one of the Chicago region’s most attractive features for thousands of local cyclists. The catch is that the trail’s pre-2016 southern terminus at Devon Avenue left users with no obvious way to travel south or east. Devon and Caldwell Avenues, which come together near the trail’s original terminus, are not bicycle- or pedestrian-friendly, and alternate routes, while available, all have their problems as well.

The second northern connection, the North Shore Channel Trail, has a more complicated history. The North Shore Channel is a man-made affluent of the North Branch of Chicago River between Lake Michigan in Wilmette and (roughly) the Falls of the Chicago River just south of Foster Avenue. Plans to build parkland along the North Shore Channel date from the years of its construction, between 1907 and 1911.¹ But the fact that the Channel’s original chief function was to carry sewage south to the Chicago River (and eventually the Mississippi) limited the attractiveness of the idea for years. Various water-purification projects and (eventually) the Deep Tunnel, however, have slowly cleaned the North Shore Channel’s water over the last six decades. The water no longer smells of sewage and is deemed safe for boating. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (which built and runs the Channel) has never felt responsible for the parkland along the waterway, so it fell to the four municipalities along the Channel—Evanston, Skokie, Lincolnwood, and Chicago—actually to develop the land. In Chicago, certain zones—notably the area where the North Shore Channel joins the North Branch just below the Falls of the Chicago River—became parks as early as the 1930s. Skokie and Evanston didn’t turn their North Shore Channel land into parks until the 1970s, when Skokie began transforming its acreage into a permanent sculpture exhibition and Evanston put a botanic garden and a nature museum on its portion. A de facto trail most of the way through these parks has existed since the late 1970s. Although the trail seems never to have been officially branded as a single entity, the name “North Shore Channel Trail” (often without the “Shore”) is widely used. Whatever the trail is called, people have been bicycling, running, and walking along its 6.8 miles (nearly 11 km) on a substantial scale since at least the 1980s. Like the North Branch Trail, however, it ends awkwardly, just north of Lawrence Avenue.

The North Shore Channel Trail near its southern terminus. The eastern end of the Falls of the Chicago River can be seen in the background.

It needs to be said both the North Branch and the North Shore Channel Trails seem today a little old-fashioned. They are not very wide, and they are used by both cyclists and pedestrians. On busy summer weekends, they can thus be rather dangerous, especially for pedestrians. Furthermore, they are both crossed by numerous busy thoroughfares. The North Shore Channel Trail includes intersection crossings where the traffic lights until recently had no provision for pedestrians and cyclists on the trail, and aggressive drivers of turning vehicles made the trail difficult for through users. The North Branch trail is on average less hazardous. It includes two bridges and one tunnel, and many of the street crossings are at mid-block rather than, as on the North Shore Channel Trail, heavily-trafficked four-way intersections.

Despite the problems, both the North Branch and North Shore Channel trails have been busy places for several decades, and the desirability of connecting them to Chicago’s Loop via the North Branch of the Chicago River has been obvious to many. All that was needed was a thirteen-or-so mile (21 km) trail from Devon Avenue to the mouth of the Chicago River. A couple of parks along the way—especially Horner Park but also the much smaller Ronan Park and some additional bits of land along the river—provided something like a mile of off-road paths, but adding to these has not been easy.

In so far as I can tell, with the exception of a path through a bit of added parkland north of Belmont Avenue, very little was accomplished until the first years of the 21st century. In 2001 and 2002, the Chicago Department of Transportation built underpasses in the three places where the southern end of the North Shore Channel Trail crossed streets (none of the crossings even had a traffic light). In 2004, in conjunction with the construction of what is now called Ward Park half a mile north of the junction of the two river branches, a short riverside trail was added just south of Chicago Avenue. Starting in 2009, the city of Chicago began opening a very different project: the Riverwalk, a carefully designed pathway along the south bank of the Chicago River as it passed through the Loop. The Riverwalk isn’t at all an ordinary recreational trail. It includes restaurants and other commercial facilities and can be jammed with tourists who have no interest in going more than a few feet. Thus, at times, bicycle access has been discouraged or forbidden. Perhaps this is what one could expect of a trail through the Loop.

While Riverwalk was being constructed, more conventional sections of recreational trail were being added along the North Branch. In 2016 and 2017 two substantial sections of trail through forest preserves in Chicago’s northwestern corner were opened. These finally brought the North Branch Trail south of Devon Avenue. The southern terminus of this three-mile addition, however, was again sited awkwardly. Finally, last year, two bridges were added in places where isolated trail segments were on opposite banks.

Map showing most of Chicago’s North Side, emphasizing off-road trails and rail-transit lines. The dates are completion-dates of certain features in the far-from-finished Chicago River Trail; see text for more information. GIS data are mostly from the Chicago Data Portal and the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; they have been heavily modified in some cases.

It’s noteworthy that most of the newest segments (the Riverview Bridge, for example) are all a little wider than the North Branch and North Shore Channel Trails and for some stretches attempt to force cyclists to the center of the trail, leaving pedestrian corridors along the edges. Furthermore, the two extreme northern sections of new trail along the North Branch include a couple of substantial bridges and one long underpass.

Here’s a table showing what has been accomplished so far. Note that I haven’t been able to confirm all the dates.² Corrections and additions would be welcome.

Approximately 2001. Path between Lakefront and Michigan Avenue, originally unpaved.
Approximately 2001. North Shore Channel Trail. Underpass under Bryn Mawr.
Approximately 2002. North Shore Channel Trail. Underpass under Foster.
Approximately 2002. North Shore Channel Trail. Underpass under Peterson/Lincoln.
Approximately 2002. Bridge across North Branch off Spalding/Carmen.
Early 21st century (including a park segment from earlier). Trail along Chicago River between Belmont and a block south of Addison (latitude of Cornelia).
2004. Ward Park (then called Erie Park), including a short trail extension along river.
2009. Riverwalk downtown between Michigan and State.
Possibly 2014. Section of trail around Diversey, i.e., Lathrop Homes (later closed temporarily when Lathrop was being reconstructed, now improved and open again).
June 2015. Riverwalk downtown between LaSalle and Lake.
September 2016. North Branch Trail. 1.8 miles. Southern extension to Forest Glen Woods.
October 2016. Riverwalk downtown between State and LaSalle.
August 2017. North Branch Trail. 1.2 miles. Southern extension to Gompers Park.
November 2019. Riverview Bridge/312 RiverRun plus approaches (between Addison and Irving Park).
December 2019 (or just after). North Shore Channel Trail. Lincoln Village Pedestrian Bicycle Bridge (north of Lincoln Avenue).
Fall 2020 (or later). Irving Park Road bridge now still under construction will include an underpass for pedestrians and cyclists.

In other words, as of late 2020, something like half of the necessary thirteen miles have been completed.

If you consider that it’s taken twenty years to build these six and a half miles,³ that means that only approximately a third of a mile per year has been completed to date. At that rate, it would take forty years to finish the trail—a long time! (And this doesn’t take into account the proposed South Side segments at all.)

Of course, what is now known as the Chicago River Trail is hardly the only recreational path to take shape only over several decades. The recreational paths along the Hudson that make up much of Hudson River Park have also been the work of many years. The more modest Schuylkill Banks project in Philadelphia may take even longer. Even Singapore is expecting its Round Island Trail (150 km) to require more than a decade to complete (and that doesn’t count the many years it took to build the already-existing paths). Hardly any government has made the construction of recreational trails a high priority, and, in some cases (including that of Chicago River Trail), the need to acquire expensive property and to micromanage private land-use change have hindered rapid work. Unless there’s a disused rail line to work with, building an elaborate recreational trail through an existing urban landscape is almost by definition an extraordinarily complicated logistical task, and it’s in some ways rather amazing that it gets done at all.

In Chicago, it does seem that things have been speeded up some. The release of the Chicago River Trail Access Plan by the Active Transportation Alliance, a private lobbying group, provided a blueprint that the city has actually been following more or less.

A major issue, however, is that many of the remaining trail segments will not be simple to build. The construction of the 312 RiverRun (finished in 2019) suggests the scope of the problem. This is a bridge across the river combined with a long trail segment over the river in a place where both banks are fully occupied. It wasn’t cheap to build.

The 312 RiverRun. Thanks to the bridge and the over-river section, there is now a one-mile continuous path between Belmont Avenue and Irving Park Road.

An additional bridge has been required north of Peterson, in Lincoln Village (also 2019). Again, cost was high.

The approach to the Lincoln Village Bridge along the North Shore Channel Trail. Note how the trail widens slightly when it reaches the bridge. Most of the new sections of trail are a little wider than the old sections.

Much of the remaining trail will probably be similarly expensive. Over a substantial portion of the projected path of the trail, both riverbanks are occupied by structures that in the ordinary course of events would not be in line for removal, so building in part over the river seems like the only option. In a city whose budget has been squeezed for years by nearly unfulfillable pension obligations and devastated by Pandemic-related spending, it’s very hard to see where funding could come from. 

But there are still opportunities for moving forward.

Insisting that private firms redeveloping the river banks must construct trails is one source of funding. The redevelopment of the Finkl Steel site furnishes both a model and a cautionary tale. The site, along Cortland Street on the east bank of the North Branch, is supposed to see the construction of Lincoln Yards, which will consist of a group of high-rise apartment buildings. It’s probably the largest traditionally industrial site along the river in line for development, and inclusion of a riverbank trail in the project is a no-brainer since such a trail would be likely to make the project more attractive to prospective residents. Under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city essentially bribed the developer to move forward with the project by allocating more than a billion dollars in TIF money for infrastructure (this would include a rebuilt Metra station and an extension of the 606 Trail as well as a riverbank trail). Many local activists have been furious about this ever since. But the Finkl plan at least shows the potential of joint action by government and private enterprise, even if it seems that government, in this case, is paying more than it needed to. If Sterling Bay, the developer, doesn’t back out of building Lincoln Yards because of the Pandemic, the result may be a half-mile or so of high-quality trail along the River.

There are some other industrial or commercial properties along the River that also seem in line for replacement. One can hope that Chicago’s planning apparatus will insist that a trail be included in any plans for these sites. It’s worth remembering that a considerable amount of public oversight and a clear-headed awareness of long-term goals are absolute prerequisites for effective public/private cooperation. When these are absent, bad things happen. Two early 21st-century private developments northwest of the Loop proper, both built with the permission of Chicago’s Zoning Board of Appeals, include narrow paths along the River that are open only to residents. These narrow private segments make the creation of a continuous public path along the River very difficult.

A long-talked-about national infrastructure effort—one focusing on environmentally sound projects—would be another possible source of funding, but, of course, no such effort yet exists.

It does seem as though there are enough people associated with relevant government agencies and lobbying groups who have an interest in continuing the project to assure that it’s not going to be forgotten. If the Chicago River Trail is ever finished or even substantially completed, the long talked-about coherent network of continuous off-road recreational trails stretching over the Chicago region will have come a little closer to existing.

Chicago opened another “shared street” a couple of weeks ago: a 1.1-mile-long stretch of Dickens Avenue between Clark Street and Racine Avenue. Chicago uses the term “shared street” for what, in many American cities, would be called a “slow street”: a street segment where, in theory, only local movement of cars and trucks is allowed and where pedestrians and cyclists have the right of way. Perhaps in response to complaints about fast driving on Chicago’s first shared street, Leland Avenue, Chicago’s Department of Transportation installed many more barricades and traffic barrels on Dickens than on Leland. As a result, it would be very difficult to drive quickly on Dickens Avenue. A perhaps unforeseen problem is that it isn’t all that easy to walk, run, or bicycle quickly on Dickens either: you have to keep swerving to avoid all the obstacles. Despite this, there were quite a number of pedestrians using the Dickens roadway on the weekday afternoons when I visited this week, many more than on Leland at comparable times. I’m not sure, however, that there were more pedestrians than there have usually been. Dickens Avenue, with its well-maintained late 19th- and early 20th-century residential buildings and thick tree cover, is an exceptionally pleasant place to walk or bicycle, and pedestrians (and cyclists) have never been rare. Although the street is presumably not itself a destination for many people except residents, commerce (and bus lines) are present at certain cross streets (Halsted and Clark Streets), and the street includes a long-pedestrianized couple of blocks between Oz Park and Lincoln Park High School.

The Dickens shared street is supposed to be a short-term experiment. There’s a story here. Dickens Avenue runs through the neighborhood known as Lincoln Park. These days, Lincoln Park is generally a well-off and well-connected place, and some of its inhabitants know what needs to be done to win political disputes. An earlier proposal to build a reverse-flow bicycle lane on the one-way portions of Dickens had stimulated vociferous protests, and the plan to make Dickens a shared street was opposed just as firmly. It’s possible that the Dickens shared street won’t be around for long, unless, of course, politically sophisticated residents come to its defense.

What I’ve seen in Chicago has made me a little skeptical of the idea of shared streets in the American context.  These streets have been set up to do two perhaps incompatible things. On the one hand, they’re supposed to be preserving motor-vehicle access. On the other hand, they’re theoretically earmarked as space for socially-distanced recreation. The problem is that many drivers, used to getting their way, tend to be baffled by (or hostile to) the idea of a shared street, and they really can’t be counted on to defer to pedestrians. The fact that Chicago DOT has felt a need to put in all those barricades and barrels on Dickens suggests the depth of the problem. The fact that, when I was on Dickens Avenue this week, most pedestrians (although not most cyclists) were sticking to the sidewalks is evidence that it’s not easy to get even beneficiaries on board with the idea of shared streets.¹

I’d be inclined to argue that those who would like to decrease the amount of space where automobiles can operate freely in cities should be a little more ambitious and push to close streets to traffic more or less completely, perhaps focusing on commercial streets that are already crowded with pedestrians. That’s certainly been the direction in which many Western European cities have been moving.

Note added 22 August 2020. The Dickens shared street was dismantled on August 20.

Overcrowded sidewalks—a bad idea in a time of social distancing—have led many American cities to start a “slow streets” program, in which pedestrians and cyclists are encouraged to use the roadways of certain streets. Chicago came to this movement rather late, but the city’s Department of Transportation finally designated a small number of streets to be “shared streets” late last week. The first of these streets, Leland Avenue between Lincoln Avenue and Clark Street (a distance of just under a mile), opened on Monday, June 1, and I went and walked both ways along the street on four successive days this week.

It’s important to understand that this segment of Leland Avenue (like most of the other designated shared streets) is a lightly used residential street. There is a stop sign at every corner, except where the street crosses Ashland Avenue, where there’s a traffic light. There are speed bumps in the middle of certain blocks. Westbound traffic is forbidden east of Damen Avenue. No driver would use this street to get anywhere fast. Because of the low traffic volume, it’s a pleasant street to walk along, and I’ve frequently found myself using Leland when I’ve wanted to walk between the Lakefront and the Lincoln Square area. Many cyclists use the street as well. During the nearly three months of the Coronavirus Pandemic, I’ve noticed quite a few people walking in Leland’s roadway, since there are enough pedestrians on the narrow sidewalks so that social distancing is otherwise difficult. When I went to take some photos for an earlier post, I made a point of walking along Leland hoping to be able to take a picture of pedestrians in the roadway, and I succeeded.

I’m sorry to report that I couldn’t help but observe while visiting Leland Avenue these last four days that there were actually fewer people walking or cycling in the roadway than there had been a couple of weeks ago, before Leland’s official designation as a shared street. Perhaps the hours I was there—afternoons on weekdays—were ill-chosen. It was quite hot one day, and it’s likely that some people who were working from home or unemployed in May are now back in their usual workplace. Whatever the reason, pedestrians this week were mostly sticking to sidewalks. Most of the time, I was the only pedestrian in sight walking on Leland Avenue itself, and I had to hang around quite a while to take photos of the roadway that included pedestrians or cyclists. Perhaps this isn’t an altogether bad thing. No pedestrian or cyclist would have had any trouble social-distancing on Leland Avenue when I was there.

One factor may be that, early in the week, there was more traffic than usual, including quite a number of delivery trucks. The latter may have been making up for the fact that deliveries were interrupted as a result of the threat of demonstrations (and, unfortunately, looting) on the previous days. Most drivers were, I’m glad to say, moving pretty slowly, but one automobile driver seemed to think that a speed of thirty or forty miles an hour was okay. I’ve observed over the years that drivers sometimes react to what they perceive as a threat to automobile hegemony by behaving with an increased level of aggressiveness. I don’t know whether that was true in this case, but I wouldn’t say that Leland Avenue seemed like a completely safe place for pedestrians.

Perhaps one issue is the signage. Most blocks just had a “Road closed local traffic only” sign (and someone had rotated this sign at the Lincoln Avenue end of Leland so that most drivers wouldn’t see it).

Other blocks had a much smaller “Slow down shared street” sign that I suspect would not have been legible to most drivers at all.

The signs were, I’m guessing, what was readily available to staff at the Chicago Department of Transportation. The “Slow down” sign may have been left over from the city’s experiment on Argyle Street between Broadway and Sheridan Road, where it attempted to create a woonerf, eliminating curbs and repaving both street and sidewalk with the same kind of bricks. The result was a certain level of befuddlement on the part of both drivers and pedestrians who continued keeping to their traditional zones, as they were mostly doing on Leland when I visited.

I certainly hope that pedestrian usage of the street picks up and that Chicago’s version of “slow streets” ends up being a success. If there were more pedestrians and cyclists on the street, the problem of aggressive driving would surely vanish instantly. But what I’ve seen these last few days did confirm a sense that I’ve had for a while that, in the United States, pedestrians (and even many cyclists) just don’t feel comfortable using roads that allow motor vehicles, even when people on foot (or on a bicycle) theoretically have the right of way. I’m not convinced that a shared street in the U.S. is even possible.

Note added 21 October 2020. The Leland shared street was extended west to Virginia Avenue in late June and east to Kenmore Avenue this month; there’s still a somewhat awkward break between Lincoln and Western Avenues. The shared portion now runs approximately 2.25 miles (3.6 km) in all. Its western terminus is close to the southern end of the North Shore Channel Trail, and its eastern terminus isn’t too far from the Lakefront. Leland has thus become the gentlest way to get between these two important pedestrian and cyclist destinations.

I’ve been on both new sections several times. Like the original shared street between Clark Street and Lincoln Avenue, the added segments, while perfectly pleasant, were not very busy when I was there. I was often the only pedestrian for several blocks in both directions (there were plenty of pedestrians on the sidewalks though). And Leland does still carry traffic, including some vehicles being driven at substantial speeds despite all the barrels. I remain a little more skeptical about Chicago’s shared streets than some folks are. 

Note added 7 December 2020. All of Chicago’s shared streets, including the one on Leland Avenue, were dismantled around December 1. The Chicago Department of Transportation argues (quite reasonably) that it cannot keep streets free of snow if the right-of-way is blocked by sign stanchions and traffic barrels.

Note added 30 May 2021. The Leland Avenue shared street was reestablished during the week of May 24 (but only east of Lincoln Avenue). There is one new feature: a 5 mph speed limit, noted on new, highly visible signs in every block. I walked up and down the street several times this week and can attest that, while few drivers were driving as slowly as 5 mph, no one was driving at 40 mph either—that’s basically good news. Just as was the case last year, hardly any pedestrians were using the roadway; there were a few cyclists taking advantage of the implicit permission to go the wrong way on the one-way portions of Leland. 

Note added 10 September 2021. The Leland shared street was completely dismantled soon after Labor Day. CDOT argued that there were not enough users to justify its continuance.

There have been hundreds of newspaper stories describing the emptiness of American cities during the Coronavirus Pandemic. This view doesn’t jibe with what I’ve observed at all. I’ll gladly admit that my experience during six weeks of “lockdown” (ever since March 16) may be distinctive. I haven’t been further than three miles from my apartment in southeastern Uptown, Chicago, for six weeks.¹ I’ve been all over Lake View, Edgewater, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, and North Center, but I haven’t been downtown or, in fact, anywhere near it. And one of the things I couldn’t help but notice is that there have actually been more people walking about than there usually are, at least at certain times of day.

One reason for this is that the lockdown in Chicago (as elsewhere in North America) has been far less strict than the lockdowns in, say, Spain, France, China, or India.² Residents have been encouraged to go outside to exercise, with the proviso that they must be willing to obey the social-distancing rules of which the most important has been: keep at least six feet from anyone else. It appears that a significant portion of the population, at least on nice days, has been taking advantage of this. Since gyms and the Lakefront parks have been closed,³ anyone wanting exercise has had to use neighborhood streets.

Take Broadway between Diversey Parkway and (roughly) Addison Street, for example, a stretch just over a mile long, lying entirely in the Lake View community area. This has been one of Chicago’s best walking streets for something like the last forty years (and maybe longer), at least if you judge the quality of a walking street by the number of pedestrians it attracts. On weekends and in early evenings, the street has always been crowded for as long as I’ve known it, even on days when it’s been exceptionally cold, snowy, hot, or rainy. There really is no time of day or night, however, when the street has been without pedestrians. There are any number of reasons for this, of which the most important is surely that the neighborhoods adjoining Broadway are by Chicago standards pretty heavily populated, with densities of something like 15,000 per square kilometer. Thus, walking is the most efficient way to move short distances.

During the lockdown, I haven’t seen Broadway anything like as crowded as it has traditionally gotten on, say, weekend afternoons, but there have still often been a huge number of pedestrians on the street. Peak hours, however, have changed. With so many people working from home (or not working at all), nice weather seems to be the main factor in bringing out crowds. The fact that, during the last two-thirds of April, it’s been rather chilly and wet in Chicago has perhaps made pleasant days all the more enticing.

Pedestrians walking along Broadway at Aldine Avenue this week. Note the masks—and the number of people walking in the street.

Neighborhood residential streets have also been very nearly as busy as they usually are. Again, there seem to be some changes in the usage patterns. There isn’t any longer a strong rush hour peak since many fewer people have been commuting to work. There have been some pretty dramatic peaks on nice afternoons, however.

Many of Chicago’s more pedestrian-oriented North Side neighborhoods, in other words, seem to be about as bustling as they were before the Pandemic arrived. While I can’t imagine anyone arguing that the Coronavirus Pandemic is anything other than a horrifying event, it has not emptied the streets of at least one part of one city.

There has, however, been one major problem. Most people seem to be taking the social-distancing guidelines quite seriously and are thus trying to avoid coming close to other people. But Chicago’s sidewalks don’t make this easy. The effective width of sidewalks in Chicago varies enormously, but few provide six feet of walking space. Even when they do, for example, along much of Broadway, the width of the sidewalk is curtailed severely by trees, bus-stop benches, bike racks, bike-share stations, light poles, newspaper boxes, electronic parking meters, wastebaskets, and fences enclosing now-empty restaurant seating areas.

Pedestrians and cyclists along Broadway at Stratford Place. Note how street furniture reduces the sidewalk’s effective width. Before the corner restaurant’s recent closure, it had a fenced-in outdoor dining area between the trees.

On residential streets, sidewalks are typically a great deal narrower than six feet. Even where the distance between the lot line and the street is more than this, much of it is often taken up by substantial strips of vegetation called “parkways” in Chicago’s vanishing working-class English.

Pedestrians in the neighborhood called Saint Ben’s by many locals (it’s part of the North Center community area). Note the narrow pavement—and the wide “parkway.”

As a result, walking on Chicago’s sidewalks these days often forces people closer than six feet from each other. Alternatively, it requires constant lateral moves, to the edge of the sidewalk for example, or onto the parkways or front lawns, or even into the street. I’ve sometimes found myself making substantial swerves two or three times a block. And it’s become normal to see people walking (or running) in the roadway. Because traffic levels are way down, this isn’t as unsafe as one might think, but it’s hardly desirable.

Pedestrians walking in the street on Leland Avenue, west of Ravenswood Avenue, in the neighborhood often called Ravenswood, which is part of the Lincoln Square community area.

The situation would almost seem designed to keep people home. Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing, but it’s somewhat at odds with the government’s professed desire to encourage exercise.

So far Chicago’s government has resisted the “slow streets” movement that has opened some roadways to pedestrian and bicycle traffic in Oakland, New York, and elsewhere. The mayor claims that, in driving around the city, she hasn’t noticed any problems. Perhaps she should try walking.

Note added 5 June 2020. Chicago’s Department of Transportation announced on May 29 that it would create some “shared streets” comparable to other cities’ “slow streets.” The first opened on June 1. For a blog post on this, click here.