Reclaiming Our Roads From Cars

Change, one might say, is afoot. We often think of streets as vehicular infrastructure, as “pipes for cars.” But streets, including the roadway surface, are social spaces — indeed public places. Stepping off the sidewalk onto the asphalt, we experience firsthand the diversity, dynamism, dangers and inequalities of the American city on the move. If we hope to achieve a more livable, equitable and sustainable city, we must reclaim the roadway for people.

Historically, American streets were bustling, mixed-use spaces, but a century ago they were swept by the epidemic novelties of the automobile and influenza. Though that pandemic abated, traffic accelerated to flood our streets and cities, which were fully redesigned around cars. So auto-centric are most streets today that we have trouble imagining that they could ever have been or ever could be different.

Yet other ideas and uses have stubbornly persisted. Over recent decades, a growing policy and design movement has advocated livable and “Complete Streets” that accommodate all modes, ages and abilities, aligned with the Americans with Disabilities Act and a Vision Zero effort to eliminate traffic fatalities. As cities embarked on this monumental, historic project, they also experimented with placemaking strategies like parklets and weekend street closures.

Then came Covid-19. Streets suddenly emptied of cars. Cities responded to the health emergency (and opportunity) by remaking roadways for socially-distanced mobility and public life. Cities expanded their traffic calming and bicycle-boulevard strategies to limit traffic on neighborhood “Slow Streets” to prioritize biking, walking, and passing conversation. Others partially or fully closed roadways as “Open” or “Shared” Streets for human-paced mobility and outdoor gathering. And pre-pandemic parklet and street-plaza programs exploded to convert parking spaces or entire rights-of-way into public places for outdoor social life and commerce.

Beyond simply accommodating non-motorized transportation, they invited social activities long confined to sidewalks — walking, playing, gathering and even sit-down conversation — onto the asphalt roadway. In the process, people experienced and became acquainted with a long-forgotten and very different kind of street.

As if such changes weren’t dramatic enough, pandemic streets also saw an explosion of protest and national debate about race and equity following George Floyd’s curbside murder in June 2020. Though immediately focused on policing, this growing conversation encompassed a broader range of equity issues, accelerating an already robust movement for mobility justice looking beyond equity among modes to address social issues beyond the public right-of-way.

American towns and cities are emerging from a watershed historical moment that forced reassessment of both the public street and mobility justice upon it. Quickly-launched, pandemic programs are being formalized as permanent transportation policies, design standards, and programming. Cities increasingly approach their transportation planning and public investments with an emphasis on equity, defined not simply in terms of transportation access but also broader social justice. And, in many places, people and organizations that had temporarily laid claim to the roadway — from pedestrians to cyclists to playing children to businesses and community organizations — are reluctant to relinquish it.

These physical changes, dramatic though they are, express a deeper reimagining of the entire street as a public sphere. By inviting a diversifying set of people to enter and have a stake in the roadway, and interpreting mobility justice more broadly than simply multimodal access, we come face to face with profound questions. What, exactly, do we mean by mobility justice? What and whom should public streets be for? And how ought they be shared equitably?

The roadway is thus at the center of swirling debates as complex in theory as they are in practice. At the conceptual level, there are diverse approaches to mobility justice.

Geographers have traditionally approached equity from the angle of spatial justice, emphasizing the fair distribution of mobility and accessibility. Planners and advocates have argued for a fair allocation of street spaces among transport modes. Yet, for most people, equity is defined in social terms, focusing on social differences — race, gender, national origin, sexual identity — and related disadvantages. Still others advocate approaching equity as a place-based concern of neighborhood stability or even intergenerational sustainability. In addition to substantive equity, we might focus on procedural questions of how to engage people in decision-making.

Different approaches to mobility justice emphasize different things, and can suggest different responses. For example, to some a bike lane addresses modal inequities and promotes sustainability (i.e. intergenerational equity). Yet others see the risk of green gentrification. This becomes a practical question: Do we build the bike lane or not?

To sort out and perhaps reconcile these different approaches, we may draw inspiration from the powerful concept of intersectionality, conceived to understand diverse social experiences and structural forces that converge to shape them.

Black Feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw has argued that power and marginalization rarely operate on a “single-axis” (like race or gender) but can intersect to create compounding burdens for people. To explain intersectionality, Crenshaw’s foundational 1989 article used the metaphor of a street: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction and it may flow in another.” People’s experiences, she suggests, are defined by “multi-dimensionality” and the intersection of multiple burdens (or forms of privilege).

Intersectionality, though primarily interpreted in terms of social differences and social equity, offers a powerful framework for rethinking mobility and mobility justice. It helps us see how experiences of mobility are shaped by distinct social forces, which converge on and are shaped by social structures, like the public roadway. And it helps us recognize that different approaches to mobility justice can operate on different axes, suggesting different policy and design solutions.

Just as an intersection must somehow reconcile approaching streets and traffic, an intersectional mobility justice must integrate different approaches to equity. It means transport systems — like street networks — should fairly distribute their benefits, harms, rights, and responsibilities across society and space. At the same time, transportation spaces like the public right-of-way should offer all users a fair share of safe and convenient access.

Because mobile people with diverse identities deserve inclusiveness, streets should be welcoming for all, especially those with social vulnerabilities. Since transportation spaces like streets are public places central to communities, they should be livable for people today and sustainable for those in the future. And, finally, because everyone has a stake in transportation, decision-making around streets should be transparent and afford meaningful voices to all, particularly those most directly impacted.

These intersecting values — in whole or part, explicitly or implicitly — have been guiding planners, transportation advocates and residents as they’ve reclaimed streets through the pandemic and beyond.

Cities are slowing their streets. Building on traditions of livable-street design and traffic calming, planners in Boston have embraced speed humps as a basic right of residents on local streets. Oakland, California and Pittsburgh have drawn upon bicycle-boulevard planning to experiment with Covid-era Slow Streets, providing a model for permanent Slow Streets and Neighborways. By simply slowing traffic, cyclists and pedestrians are invited to reoccupy the roadway for active mobility and even conversation and play.

Even more ambitious are programs to open/share streets for slow mobility and public life by closing them to car traffic. Applying lessons from weekend Cyclovía closures, during the pandemic New York, Denver, and Los Angeles hastily installed barricades to convert local roadways into shared streets. Though many of these roadways have been reopened, such cities are building these techniques into planning and public improvements to promote multimodal accessibility, expand open space in often park-poor neighborhoods, and help build community through the power of the public realm.

Taking these ideas one step further, cities have durably transformed roadways from transportation spaces into pedestrianized public places. San Francisco extended its early experiments with public, curbside parklets into a robust Shared Spaces program; Washington, D.C. expanded Streateries to extend sidewalk uses beyond the curb; and Portland, Oregon increasingly looks beyond parklets to reclaim the entire right-of-way as public street plazas. Some of these interim strategies are paving the way for permanent redesign of streets as public spaces.

The nomenclature of such programs is complicated, and distinctions among them can be subtle. Yet they share a radically ambitious goal: to remake streets from pipes for cars as places for people. In the process, they exemplify the opportunities and challenges of manifesting an intersectional mobility justice at street level. They seek a fair spatial distribution of accessibility and public improvements; go beyond multimodal accommodation at the margins to prioritize walking, biking and public gathering on the roadway itself; embrace the roadway’s broader potential as public space for diverse people; and endeavor to balance top-down spatial planning with neighborhood input, engaging diverse and underserved neighborhoods with a level of democracy unprecedented in traditionally technocratic traffic engineering.

Trying to balance distinct and competing priorities, these embody the imperfect compromises inherent in both mobility justice and everyday planning. Not only do cars continue to exert hegemonic power, but there are legitimate concerns about the privatization of the public street (and, to some degree, the risks of green gentrification). Planners struggle to balance neighborhood input, which tends to privilege the already privileged, with data-driven spatial justice. Nonetheless, these efforts to reclaim streets better approximate mobility justice than the galling inequities and unsustainability of the car-centered status quo.

Efforts to rethink mobility justice and the street, already years in the making, accelerated during the pandemic to transform our cities. Their fate remains uncertain. And to fully reclaim our roads from cars will take unprecedented collaboration and entail new conflicts.

Yet by approximating the street’s intersectional potential as a multimodal mobility space and public place, we move closer to a more equitable and vibrant city. Getting there can begin by stepping off of the curb and onto the asphalt roadway to reclaim it one step at a time.

Adapted from Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2025 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. This excerpt appears courtesy of the author and the publisher.