If you’ve been around San Francisco, you’ve probably seen a Slow Street. Usually marked with purple bollards, decorative signs, or obstructive planters diverting traffic, pedestrians, bikers, and other active urbanites have embraced SFMTA’s Slow Streets program since its 2020 inception. But with cars still wiggling around flimsy signage and bikers confused by network patchiness, we may have a ways to go until our streets work for everyone. What if instead of plastic bollards there were wood or stone barriers? What about benches, parklets, even designated activity areas? What is a fully realized Slow Street?
Car-free streets originated with endeavors like Seattle’s Bike Sundays (1965) and NYC’s Central Park closures (1966). 50 years later, the pandemic saw cities nationwide embrace car-free and car-light streets to promote social distancing and exercise. Over time, each car-free street has come to operate with its own unique typology, personality, flavor. In all their varieties, pedestrian and bike-first streets are emerging coast to coast.
Open Streets NYC is one slice of this pie, and 34th Ave in Jackson Heights, Queens is a particularly outstanding bite.
Stretching 26 blocks in the middle of Jackson Heights, 34th Ave. is the neighborhood street. Housing blocks, schools, and parks line 34th, seemingly equal parts transit corridor and local commons. School children walking side-by-side with delivery drivers and cyclists, teens playing pickup basketball amongst families vending piping-hot tamales curbside. 34th and Jackson Heights as a whole is a mesmerizing collage of urban uses, uses that embody New York’s heterogeneity and idiosyncrasy as a city. Unfortunately, Jackson Heights’ best qualities are hampered by its lackluster parks and playgrounds. Here, finding public space for everyone is a need as urgent as it is challenging. But in the densest city in the country, where do we turn?
The answers are in the asphalt. Streets present the most underutilized public space asset in American cities. Of New York’s 19,000 mile grid, 32,000 acres (75%) are dedicated to driving and parking. That’s 38 Central Parks. However ridiculous in practice, the scale of this stat describes well the monopoly that car-centric infrastructure has in our cities public space. Sure, not every street can be a park. However, if we viewed our streets more like our parks (active, accessible, green), we can approach issues of accessibility, safety, and comfort with a new energy and a more human-scaled approach. For 34th, this was the question. How do we solve the traffic injury crisis but simultaneously preserve the multi-use urban texture of our street?
In 2020, COVID-19 had residents cooped up and seeking an outlet. NYC DOT, acknowledging public health concerns, took to limiting cars on 24 miles of streets from Bronx to Brooklyn, giving close-quartered New Yorkers new, safe recreational venues. 34th Ave. epitomizes the citywide spirit of ‘out and about.’ Since opening car-free in May 2020, its stature as a model open street has grown tremendously.
Three years on, I’m witnessing it firsthand. SF Parks Forward researcher in the Big Apple, hopeful, underdressed, panting from my East Williamsburg to Jackson Heights bike odyssey (the CitiBike station at 34th and 74th a critical component in accessing and reveling in the Open Streets glory). I dismounted and walked down the middle of 34th for about 10 blocks, taking pictures, peeking around the median, and breathing in that sweet, late fall air. Within just 10 blocks, I passed by 2 parks and 3 schools, the primary what of 34th’s provisions to the Jackson Heights’ community: increased accessibility and safety to and from everyday spaces. How did they achieve this?
Through design and stewardship! Three design elements stood out to me as singularly epic (and effective). One, bike lanes. 34th’s is wide, centered, clearly marked, and furnished with memorable details like mini-crosswalks and choke points, notifying bikers of heavier foot traffic.
Two, painted bulbs resourcefully blossom from the existing median narrowing the roadway, discouraging drivers while being permeable for walkers and bikers. Also, featured here are the large boulder barriers, my final element.
The boulder diverters (doing the same job as the movable metal gates) add a sense of safety, permanence, and investment from the city. They put these boulders and planters here because they believe in the future of Open Streets.
So what did I learn that fateful afternoon in Jackson Heights? SF Slow Streets present a template for similar improvements that can revolutionize active transportation and recreation. To do so, San Francisco needs buy-in across the board.
Parents, kids, neighborhood coalitions, the Department of Transportation: they came together to reimagine 34th, investing in the idea that safer and more active streets mean safer and stronger communities. 34th also represents the necessity of grassroots organizing. It’s not always the omniscient, bureaucratic authority plopping down a few planters and road markings then calling it good. Without the consistently inspiring programming from the 34th Ave. Open Street Coalition, NYC DOT may have never invested in 34th in the way they have today.
Originally organized in 2020 to advocate for 34th’s permanent treatment, the 34th Ave. Open Street Coalition has been truly relentless in their activation of the space, with weekly postings of everything fun under the sun from chalk art workshops to clothing drives to Cumbia Sonidera dance classes. NYC DOT had to acknowledge them at some point, right? The coalition’s recontextualization of 34th as a public space led DOT to not only make that space enduring on paper, but structurally different in service of pedestrians and bikers. The folks on 34th have and continue to maximize every square inch given to them for their own community, proving that collaboration can be incredibly transformative—and that stewardship is absolutely essential.
In our own city, we can point to Page Slow Street, a similarly enthusiastic neighborhood group that took the Slow Street concept and ran with it (or rather biked, skated, and scooted with it). Whether it be block parties, bike to school-sing-a-longs, or multi-use public parklets, the public space possibilities on Page seem endless. Realizing these possibilities is going to take a concerted effort, top to bottom. So let's get the wheels turning!
“If you invite more cars, you get more cars. If you make more streets better for cars you get more traffic. If you make more bicycle infrastructure you get more bicycles. If you invite people to walk more and use public spaces more, you get more life in the city. You get what you invite.” - Jan Gehl