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Saturday, 21 August 2010 08:16

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

Municipalities all over America have been experimenting with taking cars out of Sunday circulation in certain parts of the city for a certain number of hours.

Bob Firth, who has been featured somewhat regularly in the P-G, advocates for that. He will be featured in a story on Monday (I think) about a new bicycle map he's coming out with.

Bob made car-free Sundays one of the steps in his “12 step plan” toward making Pittsburgh "a city with a lot less car in it" when he wrote the P-G's “Next Page” on May 2 this year. Read the entire piece here: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10122/1054515-109.stm

Instead of restricting cars to certain areas on Sundays in summer, I like the idea of letting them circulate everywhere but removing them from an entire lane, or two if the street has four lanes. That way merchants wouldn’t suffer loss of business, like the restaurateur in Seattle in this Post-Intelligencer article: http://www.seattlepi.com/transportation/372829_streets31.html

The Web site ecosalon (from which I pulled this photo) writes about smoggy, car-burdened L.A. doing it: http://www.ecosalon.com/ciclavia-may-bring-car-free-sundays-to-los-angeles/

Rudy Guliani did away with car-free Sundays in New York City in the ‘90s but... they’re baaack: http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/05/14/its-car-free-streets-season-in-nyc/.

In an article published last year, the Oregonian tells us about Portland’s successful experiment with making Sundays partially car free on certain routes and for certain hours:
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/susan_nielsen/index.ssf/2009/07/carfree_sundays_in_portland.html

Holy heck, even Baltimore's gotten its duff into it: http://www.baltimorebrew.com/2009/09/30/roland-avenue-will-be-bicycles-only-on-sunday-october-25/. I hate it when Baltimore does something cool before we do.

Bob Firth tells me that Pittsburgh should be compelled to do this, since we’re always bragging about how green we are.

“Let’s have one lane carved out for bicyclists only” on Sundays, Bob said. “Let’s use that as a test toward a dedicated bike lane on Fifth Avenue from the edge of Downtown to Penn Avenue at Mellon Park. That would be incredible to bicycle protected down the spine of the city.”

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