Market Square

[jamincan]

One more suggestion, which is irrelevant to existing downtowns but absolutely could have been done in a place like what is now downtown Mississauga: if, instead of providing a skybridge network as an alternative to street level, we decide that pedestrian street level is 5m above motor vehicle street level, I think most of your objections vanish entirely. At that point, you have two levels: on one level, cars and other motor vehicles travel, while on another, people walk and bicycle around. Then it doesn’t matter if cars travel too fast for compatibility with pedestrian traffic because there are none. It doesn’t matter if restaurants, for example, can survive on the motor vehicle level, because in effect that’s the basement and we don’t complain that basement restaurants have trouble surviving elsewhere.

That reminds me of the raising of Chicago.

I know one criticism of these spaces is that they are typically private which has a number of implications for free movement, speech etc.