How does your Main Street make you feel?
How does your Main Street make you feel?
Barcelona’s most popular street puts pedestrians first and cars second. The downtowns that I know could take lessons.
We could not step out our front door without bumping into a tourist. It was five months before the pandemic, and my wife and I had just arrived in Barcelona. Chance had landed us in a short-term apartment on the city’s most iconic — and heavily trafficked — street: La Rambla.
Below our fifth-story windows passed religious processions, rowdy protests, football hooligans (read: soccer) and a never-ending stream of visitors to the Catalan capital. Walking the street we caught snatches of French, Portuguese, Russian (it was pre-invasion) and a whole lot we could not decipher. Our fellow travelers flowed by in such numbers that stepping out the building’s ground-level door was, surprisingly often, like stepping into a nightclub.
I had heard of La Rambla before we arrived. Every guide features it, for starters. George Orwell mentions it in Homage to Catalonia. And terrorism had put it in the news: a few years before we arrived, a 22-year-old drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in 2017, killing 15 and injuring dozens more. When we told friends in California that we had landed the apartment, many had a Rambla story to tell us.
Once we’d arrived, it was hard not to be enchanted. Sure, there’s plenty to dislike. Tourism has driven out most local flavor and replaced it with, well, the grotesque. The restaurants that are left serve fluorescent ‘cocktails’ and beer steins the size of bird baths. In a city with blessedly little American fast food, our apartment was not far from a KFC and a McDonald’s. Spaniards still live on the street, including across the hall from us, but most do not seem to dine or shop at most of its establishments.
Yet for all of that, I still find La Rambla gorgeous. Walking down its nearly mile-long length always feels to me like a respite, even as the city buzzes all around. Towering plane trees shade you on a pedestrian walkway as wide as a multi-lane highway, and handsome facades offer eye candy. One favorite of mine features dragons and umbrellas, the legacy of a former paraguas shop. There are mythical creatures at street-level, too, in the form of street performers performing for tips. And in our first week, we were stopped in our tracks by a piercing aria: the opera house had staged a walkway performance to sell tickets to that night’s show.
What struck me most of all, as someone who likes to play-act as urban planner in my mind and is still in recovery after a lifetime dependence on cars, was the seeming absence of vehicles. There are cars on La Rambla, but they are given only single-width lanes on either side of the walkway. And every 20 yards or so they are forced to a stop by a traffic light or pedestrian crossing. Walking through the heart of the city, I almost forget they are there.
In short, on the most famous street in Barcelona, cars have been pushed to the margins. Pedestrians, instead, get center stage. Taking a car down the Rambla, as the occasional cab ride has shown me, is easily the most arduous and unrewarding way to traverse the street. The best? Walking.
It makes me think of the main streets in all the cities and neighborhoods I’ve lived and worked in across California. The boulevard lined with antique stores in my hometown of Petaluma. Berkeley’s funky and celebrated Telegraph Avenue, as well as Shattuck and University. Historic Washington Street in the Gold Rush town of Sonora, or Main Street in nearby Angels Camp. The series of strip malls down Vermont and Franklin Avenues in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. Oakland’s downtown grid of Broadway, Telegraph, and their numbered counterparts. Richmond’s alternately vibrant and vacant McDonald Avenue. (Perhaps you know one of these?)
Every single one I’ve named puts cars in the center. That’s what we do in America. We put cars first, pedestrians second. Cars own the landscape, the soundscape, the smellscape. I can still taste the diesel in the air on Sonora’s Washington Street. I still recall the fear, as a kid, of the cars whooshing by on Petaluma Boulevard. I still wince with the memory of near misses with murderous LA drivers.
There are flickers of hope. My hometown’s main street, Petaluma Boulevard, was narrowed in recent years. Oakland’s Telegraph got bright new bike lanes and planter boxes while I was still in the Bay. Market Street in San Francisco, too, has gone multicolor with new space for cyclists.
What I long for is even more ambition. A landscape where walking or biking is always more pleasant than getting behind the wheel. A future California — and United States — in which living without a car is an easy choice, not a matter of steely determination. I want more streets that smell not like stale exhaust, but fresh leaves; that inspire not fear, but joy (and arias!); and where no car can travel fast enough to kill.
As I write this, Barcelona has launched a major project to remake the bottom of La Rambla. It will open even more space for people and push cars into even more narrow channels. In other words, one of the most walkable cities in the world is not satisfied with its most popular pedestrian-friendly street. So why should we be with ours? Besides, it’s not like Barcelona has only one Rambla…
drop | Take a walk. Leave your car at home. Walk your main street. How does it make you feel? Could it be better?
ripple | Talk about it. Ask your friends and neighbors what they think. Talk about what could improve — and how to make that happen.
wave | Advocate. Join or support a local group, such as WOBO. Read their emails. Sign their petitions. Attend their meetings. Don’t know of one in your area? Look through America Walks’ list.
Have even better ideas? I’m new at this. Reply to this email to get in touch.
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This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my proofreader, Steve Kay, and my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.