Car-free streets

The group wants a unified regional transit system; more bike and bus lanes, and car-free streets; and downtown congestion pricing to fund sustainable transportation.

Pratt Street is a narrow, one-way block-long street in the heart of downtown Hartford, Connecticut, lined with red brick pavers and historic storefronts. It's also the latest street in the United States to go car-free, at least some of the time, as part of the city's first agreement to spend parking meter revenue on local streetscape improvements.

Barcelona is making waves with plans to test a concept it's calling "superblocks." The idea is to create nine-block squares of "citizen spaces" -- about 400 meters on each side -- where cars would be limited. Unlike the widely derided superblocks of the urban renewal era, Barcelona's would be explicitly designed to preserve the street grid for walking and biking -- only motor vehicle through traffic would be discouraged.

[This article also runs in Checkerboard City, John's transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

A peculiar thing tends to happen when we talk about streets and transportation: We don't talk about cars. Seriously -- listen to conversations, read news headlines, and you'll start to notice that even when cars are the main subject, people will, consciously or unconsciously, fail to explicitly mention them.

Streetfilms has been documenting the open streets movement for over seven years, beginning with our landmark film in 2007 on Bogota's Ciclovia, currently the most viewed Streetfilm of all time.

The above video, excerpted from a Dutch television documentary series, shows how children helped catalyze the fight for safe streets in Amsterdam more than a generation ago.