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festiv al streets

The Sarasota Chalk Festival (Venice, FL)

A festival street promotes a sense of community by
allowing a street to be closed to traffic on multiple
occasions during the year for pedestrian-focused
special events. Festival streets allow for a broader
use than transportation such as commerce, socialization,
community celebration, and recreation.

New York City’s Department of Transportation broke
ground with its Sustainable Streets strategic plan,
released in 2008, which includes a focus on
recognizing “streets as vital public places that
foster social and economic activity, in addition to
their more traditional roles as corridors for
travel.” This document outlined a series of policy
and programmatic priorities to “make our streets
great destinations,”including the launch of the
Public Plaza initiative, raising the agency’s streetscape
standards, expanding a public art on the streets
program, and fostering temporary and permanent
pedestrian streets.

The Essex Street Pedestrian Mall (Salem,

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