A pedestrian street is a street where pedestrian traffic is given partial or total priority over all other kinds of traffic. Usually, motorised vehicles are excluded. In some cases wheeled vehicles or transportation systems such as bicycles, inline skates, skateboards and push scooters are tolerated or given special lanes. Many pedestrian streets are surfaced with cobblestones, or pavementbricks, thus discouraging any kind of wheeled traffic, including wheelchairs.
Except for special towns or zones where cars and trucks are totally excluded (such as Venice or the Toronto Islands) a pedestrian street is rarely completely free of motor vehicles. Often, all of the cross streets are open to motorized traffic, which thus intrudes on the pedestrian flow at every street corner. In a few pedestrian streets with no cross street cars or trucks deliveries are made by trucks by night.
In the last decades of the 20th century many urbanists have listed and explained what they see as the virtues of pedestrian streets. Urban renewal activists have often pushed for the creation of auto-free zones in parts or in all of the sectors of a metropolitan area.
References
Breines, Simon. William J. Dean. The pedestrian revolution;: Streets without cars.Vintage Books, 1974.
Jacobs, Allan B.. Great streets.Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1993
Robertson, Kent A. Pedestrian malls and skywalks : traffic separation strategies in American downtowns. Aldershot, Hants, England ; Brookfield, Vermont : Avebury, 1994.
Locating the pedestrian push buttons at some distance from the crosswalk, which is common now, makes it difficult for a pedestrian, particularly a blind pedestrian or a pedestrian using a mobility aid, to push the button and return to the crosswalk location in time for the walk phase.
Advisory: While this is in contrast to the convention in visual street naming, where the street name is parallel to the street itself in order to be visible to drivers and pedestrians, it is not in contrast to visual signs adjacent to pedestrian push buttons which indicate which street is controlled by the push button.
Because the pedestrian crosswalk is generally placed at least one car length from the entry point, in a location that is not immediately apparent to a blind or visually impaired pedestrian, a cue is needed for crosswalk location.
However, a street is characterized by the degree and quality of street life it facilitates, whereas a road serves primarily as a through passage for road vehicles or (less frequently) pedestrians.
Street performers, beggars, patrons of sidewalk cafés, peoplewatchers, and a diversity of other characters are habitual users of a street; the same people would not typically be found on a road.
In this view, pedestrian traffic is incidental to the street's purpose; a street consists of a thoroughfare running through the middle (in essence, a road), and may or may not have sidewalks along the sides.
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