Living Streets of OpenStreetMap US
OSM follows the King’s English: sports are played on a pitch, centre is spelled fancy, and streets can be a motorway, trunk road, primary / secondary / tertiary, residential, or some specialized options. One which did not connect with me as an American was living street, represented with highway=living_street.
Living street as a regional / legal / linguistic concept
According to Wikipedia, a living street is designed “in the interests of pedestrians and cyclists” with slowed car traffic. Despite the article being written by American transportation policy historians, they produce no local examples. The article presents several European street signs; I assume it is a common sight across these countries:
The article suggests Dutch term woonerf which has its own article and had a cultural moment in the US (I’m trying to pin down when this was; Google Trends is rather sparse but I thought we were already post-woonerf in 2012).
Australia and New Zealand call the concept a Shared Zone, which somehow gets its own Wikipedia article.
Overall we don’t have living streets, but know that we do want some here in the US to evolve into a new urbanism utopia.
Do Americans have living streets without realizing it?
It’s a shame the living streets article does not discuss pedestrian malls or pedestrian plazas. I’m not sure how chill this term is in suburban consciousness, but it at least has a presence in US and Canadian English. City Beautiful has posted videos about old and new pedestrian malls for years.
Somewhat confusingly, open-air shopping malls in Pittsburgh, PA (left) and Emeryville, CA (right) are not marked as living streets except where private car traffic is blocked by bollards.
One of the major issues is that a living street requires some pedestrian-izing work, but remains open to cars. In the US new urbanism activists have focused on closing streets or trimming them to make plazas (in Times Square and by the Flatiron Building in NYC). From some combination of those prominent examples, influential funding from former mayor Bloomberg, and car-centric psychology, we believe that it’s natural for any car route to be speedy and unsafe for kids unless it can be reserved. I mean, take another look at those European signs. A kid playing in the street right in front of a car, yikes. At least that’s how I’d explain it.
The OSM wiki forbids a ‘living street’ label for city streets which were temporarily closed to cars during Covid-19 measures. Google Maps did an excellent job of tracking these and making them discoverable. I saw some cool neighborly activity on these in fall 2021 / early 2022, so that’s a bit of a missed opportunity in the open maps world.
Searching for living streets in Chicago, as tagged by users
Using Overpass Turbo, I can find living streets in my city and around the world. This could provide insight into well-planned urban areas which haven’t had their own Insta-moment yet.
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out;In Chicago this highlighted several areas:
- Navy Pier — this one makes sense. It is a mall with a pedestrian-plaza type road. Similar to the Emeryville Bay Street Mall, it seems the OSM US community will use living street for ‘roads which can accept vehicles but are generally closed’.
- Six blocks of W. Argyle Street, known as West Argyle Street Historic District: this might be the truest result. The article labels it ‘Little Saigon’ or ‘New Chinatown’ with recognition dating back to the 1960s. It’s a city street open to cars, but with wider sidewalks.
- Greenview Passage — this is a one-way road through an apartment complex. It is not open to the public.
- Various cul-de-sacs, access roads to a few houses, and roads winding through apartment complexes — I think this is a choice by map editors to label their local parking as a ‘living street’ to emphasize it is not used for thru-traffic, even though it may mostly hold cars.
Searching for living streets elsewhere in the US
In Ann Arbor, MI there are three labeled: a greenery-draped alleyway, a dead end with seven houses, and apartment parking.
Manhattan has a handful including the Flatiron and Times Square plazas mentioned earlier, and this block of E. 43rd Street east of Grand Central:
Then I was surprised to see two out of three blocks of Union Square West marked as living street, but after further inspection in Google Street View, I discovered these were closed to car traffic in 2019!
Conclusions
The idea to search for hidden gems of new urbanism through the living street query needs work. I did discover a new parklet and that NYC has changed without me. In Chicago the query returns two areas which would be good to walk around as a tourist. This seems helpful.
On the negatives — American responses to the ‘living street’ option are intriguing. It is coded as ‘a street where you can’t drive on it anymore’ or completely differently to un-urbanize an apartment complex or cul-de-sac. Maps are always political, but it is interesting that when a section of street added a parklet or restricted cars, volunteer editors were compelled to edit that in. If you feel that ‘living street’ editors are doing it wrong by the definition, I’d encourage creating a more diverse set of renderable tags, so people can respond to these real-life changes.
