New York has begun closing parts of Broadway in Times Square and Herald Square on weekends to create additional pedestrian space in these busy areas.

San Francisco recently closed part of 17th Street at Market in the Castro as a trial pedestrian plaza:

Finally, San Francisco is now closer to considering a carfree Market Street:

Even though it’s sort of Web 1.0, I’m glad someone is collecting these data. The New York maps are kind of boring, really, and more or less confirm what most people already know: there’s a lot going on there, all over, all the time. LA is more interesting, and because event venues are more spread out you can get a better feel for what’s going on given the scale of the graphics.

Better yet would be to scrape data from yelp or eventful or whatever and show this stuff real time. Is it really worth paying some professor a full year’s salary to do this?

Looks like we’re finally earning out keep as the capital of the Left Coast. New York has one-upped us for too long on reappropriating unused asphalt (thanks to that pesky Janette Sadik-Khan), but San Francisco just unveiled plans for its first street pedstrianization project, at the corner of 17th and Market.

The opinion among my planner friends is that the very low volume of ped traffic on 17th makes this a less than ideal choice. But I’ll bet that it’ll pick up pretty quick, what with all the traffic between the suntanning salon and Twin Peaks bar . . . .

Credit where credit is due – even though one of our roommates works for the city, I found this on the always information Streetsblog.