Market St. has never been a significant thoroughfare for private cars. Of course there’s no traffic impact.
Try the same thing on Mission, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Geary, Van Ness, etc. and you’ll see a very different story.
Try the same thing on Mission, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Geary, Van Ness, etc. and you’ll see a very different story.
Vancouver shut down its core arterial streets to traffic during the 2010 olympics (Broadway, Hastings) and spiked transit funding to compensate. Nothing bad happened and people shifted their behaviour pretty easily.
Later on with a new government transit funding increased and transit has subsequently been seeing double digit growth.
The entire exercise makes me feel pretty confident that you can close off road space and so long as you're funding viable alternatives things are fine.
People take whatever is easiest, so in cities like LA it's no suprise that millions of people would rather sit in traffic hell for 45 minutes one way a day when their transit trip would be an hour and a half, if everything works.
If you want less people driving, then you need to provide a better alternative beyond transit just being the civically minded thing to do. It also doesn't help when its not perceived to be the most safe alternative, in terms of crime and harassment.
But to frame this as a triumph against critics predicting doom is just weird. No one was seriously predicting doom on this one. The only people driving on Market are confused tourists. But then it’s going to be held up as an example for other streets that actually do have risks and tradeoffs.
Probably not. More car lanes = more cars. Less car lanes = less cars. People switch modes, drive elsewhere, don't take trips, etc. Time and time again (Paris, London, NYC, SF, Portland, Seattle, and many many more) cities have taken space from cars without carmageddon.