Croatia's Walkable City Centers
I've recently travelled to Croatia, and wanted to share the most wonderful part of my travels with Orphan Road: walkable cities. Not all of the cities and towns I visited were walkable, but a large portion had at least a walkable downtown area. This downtown area, without exception, was car-free.
Without exception, these walkable areas were the most enjoyable areas of a city and most of the locals didn't seem to even own cars. Outside of these walkable areas there was much sprawl and traffic, as we experience here. Inside the walkable area were restaurants, small grocery stores, and shops on main roads and very high density housing on minor roads and above the shops. The furthest you'd ever need to walk on a daily basis is around 10 minutes away. Train and ferry stations generally land in or near this part of town, allowing the residents to travel throughout Europe quickly and easily. I sat in the Dubrovnik town square with a few thousand Croatians cheering together for their soccer team, projected on a screen next to an ancient clock tower.
How did the Croatians tackle the tough decisions to make these cities so enjoyable? They didn't. Every one of these areas were built by the Romans. Dubrovnik, Rovinj, Split, Korcula, Hvar, (etc.) started out as Roman palaces, were built out further as medieval castles, and were inherited by modern times as car-free centers simply because cars won't fit in the narrow streets.
Can we re-invent these cities here? Can you imagine Pike's market without the line of cars through the middle? Dense areas with lively streets an easy walk from transit? Maybe even a small dense car-free area at the Beacon Hill Link station? I think it's worth a try.
- Matt the Engineer's blog
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It might be good to note that these walkable European areas are generally reserved for the elite. This is certainly obvious in Rome. But of course, this isn't an argument against them as much as an argument that WE NEED MORE!
Also, why can't we make Pike Place Carfree? I don't get it. They limit parking all the time and its certainly not a main thoroughfare. Would it be that hard to just cut out all non-shipping traffic altogether? It would be a nice statement too, and save them money on refurbishing the pretty brick from all those wheels.
Ah, for the non-elite example we would go to the spice market area of Old Delhi. They have very narrow streets designed for only two horses to pass each other. Of course now it's a tourist destination, but in the past it was a poor area (though looking even further back, it was rich again). There are also areas all through Varanasi that would work as similar examples.
I have no idea why we allow cars through Pike's Place.
Well, the short answer is that trucks and fire engines need the access and allowing the cars becomes a marginal cost. It's also true that you don't need to buy very many apples and oranges before you're toting a substantial load.
There are no simple problems- there are only simple solutions.
How they handle this in Croatia is by having access-code controlled bollards that pop up from the street. Store owners are given the code and presumably can only use it a certain number of times during the day.
But we could even go low-tech and have a sign that says "Wrong Way - Delivery Vehicles Only".
In Manchester, England they used bollards to restrict traffic on a busy pedestrian-oriented street to post office and buses. It looks like they used a remote control to open them.
For fun search youtube for "bollard runners". You can see that they are very effective too!
It really annoys me to see the folks driving through the market and getting annoyed by the people walking all over the place.