Flagler Street in downtown Miami was converted to a pedestrian mall in 1982. The conversion was a disaster. Without cars, the street lost the traffic that had sustained its retail. Businesses closed. The mall became a marginal space, used primarily by people who had nowhere else to go. In 2002, the city reversed course and reopened the street to cars.
The Flagler Street story is a cautionary tale about pedestrianization done wrong. But it is also, in retrospect, a story about timing. In 1982, the conditions for a successful pedestrian street in downtown Miami did not exist. The residential population was too small, the transit network too weak, the surrounding neighborhoods too depressed. The pedestrian mall was a solution to a problem that the city was not yet ready to solve.
What Has Changed
The conditions in American downtowns have changed significantly since 1982. Downtown residential populations have grown in most major cities. Transit investment has increased. The demographics of urban residents have shifted toward younger people who are more likely to walk, cycle, and use transit. The cultural preference for urban living, which was marginal in 1982, is now mainstream among educated Americans under forty.
These changes have created new possibilities for street design. Cities that tried and failed to pedestrianize streets in the 1970s and 1980s are trying again, with better results. The High Line in New York, the Riverwalk in San Antonio, the BeltLine in Atlanta — these are not pedestrian malls in the old sense. They are new forms of public space that have emerged from the specific conditions of their cities.
The Miami Question
Miami is a harder case than most American cities. The heat and humidity make walking uncomfortable for much of the year. The city's development pattern — sprawling, car-dependent, with large gaps between destinations — makes walking impractical even when it is comfortable. The transit network, while improving, is still inadequate for most trips.
And yet Miami is also a city where people want to be outside. The waterfront is the city's greatest asset, and the best parts of Miami — South Beach, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables — are the parts where walking is possible and pleasant. The challenge is to extend those conditions to the rest of the city, which means not just redesigning streets but redesigning the land uses that streets serve.
The return of the American street is real, but it is uneven. It is happening in the neighborhoods that were already walkable, in the cities that already had the density and the demographics to support it. The harder work — making streets work in places that were designed for cars — is still mostly ahead of us.