Today is my favorite day where I live on Hope Street in #Providence, #RhodeIsland. It's the Hope Street Block Party. For 8 glorious hours, four or five blocks of Hope Street shut down to cars.
What we get instead:
2 stages of music
a marching band with aliens (Big Nazo)
a Lion Dance
thousands of people coming to visit, mill around, listen to music, talk with their friends & neighbors, eat, drink and buy shit.
#urbanism
/1
We have a lot of great businesses on Hope Street to support this party. But even those greedy, small-minded Hope Street merchants who think of nothing beyond their sales have to appreciate:
*thousands? of customers milling by
*tens to hundreds of thousands? of dollars worth of economic activity.
I can attest to this; I ran drink ticket sales for an hour at one location from 11 am - noon (not the busiest hour) & sold around ~1K worth of tickets; we had 4 people taking orders at 2 locations.
/2
The simple fact is that you can fit a lot more people, and a lot more activity, on a street *without* cars than you can with it. And if you make your business district attractive & fun, people will come their even if they can't *park in front of your store*.
These are the simple facts that many Hope merchants still refuse to see. We know who they are; many of us in the bike & urbanist community do not shop at their stores.
Sooner or later, we'll replace them with businesses that get it. /3
But in the meantime, there are some great Hope Street businesses that *do* support bike & pedestrian infrastructure (or are at least not hostile to it) that you can visit:
1) Frog N' Toad (quirky Rhode Island stuff)
2) Kreatelier (upholstery, clothing, housewares)
3) Little Sister (brunch)
4) Cafe Zoey (crepes)
5) Stock (kitchenware)
6) Maryasia's (dry cleaning & tailoring)
7) Executive Hair Salon (self-explanatory)
/4
My takeaway:
We should shut down Hope Street to #cars and have a block party there every day - or at least every week.
By removing cars from streets, you make way for so much cool shit that you can't do with them there. But mostly, you make way for joy.
And that's the future that we urbanists want.
/5/end
Hey @citykidPVD. Do we know each other? And are you familiar with Providence Urbanist Network (PUN)? Let's meet up and talk about the future of our city.
c dot roselund at gmail dot com.
UPDATE: It appears that the Hope Street block party actually had 10,000 attendees (police estimate) and we sold more than $24,000 in drink tickets. This is higher attendance than I suspected and verifies my estimate that this event involved tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of economic activity (there were dozens of other vendors besides those selling alcohol).
Shutting the street down to cars is *good for business*. #urbanism
Christian Roselund