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In February, the city of Denver�� a segment of a restaurant-lined street in its town center to car traffic. The move ended a five-year experiment that created new space for fresh-air strolling and socializing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Denver’s Larimer Street was one of hundreds of U.S. streets that opened to bikers and pedestrians during the pandemic, limiting car traffic. These street-focused emergency response measures, billed as “open streets,” “slow streets” or “shared streets,” allowed restaurants to expand their outdoor dining spaces and provide safe spaces for walking or rolling on bikes. Kevin J. Krizek, a professor of environmental design, has researched these measures.

Kevin Krizek

“That was a valuable experiment, allowing cities and residents to see their public spaces in different ways,” Krizek said. “They showed the power of spurring vibrant spaces when people eat outside and brought different forms of society together in these areas.”

But five years later, many of these trial programs have ended as funding, permits and support ran out.

In 2022, Boulder, Colorado, reverted a stretch of its��. In New York City, the number of open street project miles����between 2020 and 2022.

Krizek shared his take about how COVID-19 temporarily changed cities across the United States, what cities learned and why many of these forward leaning programs didn’t last.

How did COVID-19 reshape our cities?

During COVID-19, experimentation with slow or open streets was a big breakthrough. Neighbors saw their public space in new light and leaned on their nearby streets to provide space for walking, riding bikes and meeting people in safe spaces.

Americans often travel to Europe to experience the vibrant outdoor cafes and active street life. COVID allowed them to see the possibility of doing that here and the power of changing streets overnight. That's one of the most valuable lessons COVID taught us: Street space could quickly change and be used for more than moving and storing cars.

Are American cities designed to support pedestrians, bikes and safe public spaces?

No. American cities are mostly designed to maintain the swift movement of cars. If you take an aerial view of the country, roughly a third of our cities are devoted to space owned by the public, and most of that space is devoted to either storing or moving cars.

Coming out of the second industrial revolution in the 1930s, city designers began writing a whole labyrinth of legislative codes to prescribe the width of travel lanes, the turning radii and the length of a green light. All these rules were designed to swiftly move cars.

These outdated codes have become the architectural blueprint for most American cities and continue to be followed.

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Denver opened up several blocks of its Larimer Street to pedestrians and bikes during COVID-19. (Credit: )

What are the consequences of that design?

In the past decades, cars in the U.S. have become larger, higher, more intimidating and heavier. They are now more dangerous, especially at high speeds.

Cities continue to allow these vehicles to dominate our streets, all in the interest of convenience and economic vitality. But swiftly moving traffic and safe walking are mostly mutually exclusive, particularly around intersections.

Traffic violence has killed more than 40,000 people each year over the past years in this country. That number equals a Boeing 737 plane going down every other day. When a plane crashes, we spend months investigating the cause. But when a car crash happens, we sweep up the carnage as quickly as we can, and we revert the system back to ‘normal’ conditions as quickly as we can. We��fail to properly investigate and address the underlying factors that lead to these crashes. We've all become complacent with the risk and the need for speed, assuming there’s little to be done.

How did the public respond to these COVID-era experiments?

Many communities used these street changes as novel experiments. Studies found that, despite the isolation of COVID, people leaned into public spaces, which helped the local community integrate in ways that were previously unfathomable.

Why were they discontinued?

A lot has to do with how we frame the access to key spaces in our communities. Because American cities are designed for cars, many businesses are only accessible by driving there. Such businesses claim that if you diminish that access, you're compromising economic vitality.

That’s mostly an unsupported fear. There’s a slew of studies showing that if a town provides for multiple ways to get there, over time, more people access these businesses using varied modes.

What can individuals do to push for more pedestrian-friendly cities?

We, as a society, collectively accept an enormous amount of risk every time we get in and out of our cars.That risk comes with personal conveniences. We can ask ourselves to better understand the costs of these personal conveniences and to accept better street planning protocol that allows lower speeds and heightens safety on our transportation system.

People who want their cities to become safer and more pedestrian-friendly can approach their city council person and say, ‘We'd like to express our desire to move beyond the existing codes that lock us in.’ Changing existing codes, while challenging, is possible when citizens empower their city councils to think differently and create safer public streets.��