Designing Streets for People: A Lesson from Barcelona
How a few design tweaks could make New York’s neighborhoods more vibrant and delightful.
I often find myself wishing that New York had more inviting public spaces for relaxing, spending time with friends, and connecting with neighbors. I love spending time in our city’s outdoor spaces. I’m a big fan of Central Park, Hudson River Park, and smaller plazas like Madison Square Park, Union Square, and Washington Square Park. But outdoor spaces of respite are still scarce, and I wish we had more of them.
That’s one reason I was so excited to visit Barcelona earlier this year. Spain’s second-largest city has made impressive progress in retrofitting pedestrian-priority streets, parklets, and plazas into its dense urban fabric. The result is a city full of calm, beautiful spaces where people feel welcome.
From my visit, I noted three design principles that make Barcelona’s pedestrian-priority streets especially effective and enjoyable:
Comfortable and lively public spaces, with seating, plants, cafés, and playgrounds.
Smart street layouts that discourage through-traffic but still allow vehicle access for local needs.
A unified, flat surface across the street, making it feel like a pedestrian zone even when vehicles are present.
In this post, I’ll break down these design strategies and explore how New York could take inspiration from these approaches.
Comfortable, Welcoming Street Furniture
Barcelona’s public spaces start with simple additions: benches and plants. These give people a reason to linger—whether to rest, chat, or watch the world go by. The greenery adds visual appeal and softens the environment.
New York does this well in some parks and plazas, but many of our pedestrianized streets and avenues lack basic seating. You’ll often find plenty of space to walk, but nowhere to sit. Adding more benches and planters would be a low-cost way to make our streets more inviting.
Discouraging Through-Traffic Without Banning Cars
A core goal of any pedestrianization project is to reduce the disruption and danger caused by vehicles. But cities still need vehicle access—whether for people with limited mobility, deliveries, or service vehicles.
Barcelona handles this tension beautifully. Pedestrian-priority streets are still open to cars, but the road network is designed so that driving through these areas is slow and inconvenient. Speed limits are just 10 km/h (about 6 mph), and streets are laid out to loop back on themselves, making them poor choices for through-traffic. As a result, only drivers with a specific destination on the street tend to enter.
Here’s a diagram showing how the one-way loop system in the Eixample neighborhood discourages cut-through driving on pedestrian-priority streets (in green):
On these streets, cars can stop briefly to pick up or drop off passengers. During the day, trucks and vans can park for up to 30 minutes to load or unload goods.1 But private car parking is not allowed, further discouraging unnecessary driving.
New York has attempted to reduce vehicle presence around the city with mixed success. In small areas the city has managed to fully exclude vehicles: Times Square, parts of Broadway, slivers of Meatpacking, etc. Elsewhere, the city has supported temporary exclusions of vehicles, such as Open Streets and Summer Streets programs. These temporary exclusions have typically relied on staffed barricades to keep cars out, which has been very expensive and limited their expansion.2
One Level, One Message: This Space Is for People
What really sets Barcelona apart is how the entire street feels like it belongs to pedestrians. Instead of having raised sidewalks and a sunken roadway, the entire width of the street is paved at one level using attractive paving stones.
This uniform surface makes it easy for people to walk freely and comfortably across the street. At the same time, vehicles have to drive up a curb ramp when entering the zone, which reinforces the message: you’re entering a pedestrian space. The design communicates that vehicles are guests here, not the default user.
New York's recent pedestrianization projects in recent years have often resorted to painting the roadway, but maintaining the pre-pedestrianization elevated sidewalk and lower roadbed. This leaves pedestrians feeling like an afterthought, trying to make-do with our converted car-focused infrastructure. Here's an example on Broadway in Manhattan:
How Could New York Make This Work?
New York is not Barcelona, and we shouldn’t try to copy Spain’s approach wholesale. Our street grid, traffic volumes, and infrastructure are different in important ways. But there’s still a lot we can learn—and adapt.
While Manhattan’s avenues carry too much traffic for full pedestrianization, many residential cross-streets offer real potential. Imagine if we selected a few of these blocks and redesigned them as pedestrian-priority zones: calm, green, welcoming spaces where people come first.
Inspired by Barcelona, we could re-route traffic on pedestrian-priority blocks to discourage through-drivers while preserving local vehicle access. Potentially, we could do this by flipping the one-way traffic direction on an individual block. Drivers could still pick up or drop off passengers and goods, but wouldn’t use the block to reach destinations beyond. The layout would send a clear message: this is a place for people, not a shortcut.
Lower speed limits, wide flat paving, and simple additions like benches, planters, and play equipment would make these streets places to gather and enjoy—not just pass through.
A Little Courage Can Go a Long Way
Look back at Street View, and you’ll see that the Barcelona blocks I photographed were filled with cars as recently as 2022. Just two years later, they’ve become places of joy and vibrancy—full of life, greenery, and conversation.
That kind of transformation doesn’t require sweeping citywide mandates. It just takes one neighborhood willing to try something new—supported by the Department of Transportation, a local community board, or a neighborhood association. The real shift is in mindset: a willingness to rethink how our streets serve us and to test small, meaningful upgrades.
New York has always been a city of reinvention. Our streets don’t have to stay the way they are—we can make them greener, calmer, and more welcoming. The enthusiasm for New York’s Open Streets and Summer Streets programs shows that New Yorkers are eager for pedestrian-friendly spaces. The key is to find ways to make these pedestrian zones durable and permanent, rather than labor-intensive pop-ups.
Barcelona shows us what’s possible: streets that are lively, not loud; green, not gray; and above all, made for people. Let’s bring that spirit home. Even one block at a time.
Learn more about Barcelona’s systems for goods deliveries: https://areaverda.cat/en/dum
In 2024, Summer Streets cost $1.5 million to pedestrianized segments of each borough for up to 3 days. Open Streets cost $30 million in 2024. These funds cover both pedestrianization staffing and programming within the pedestrianized areas.
The flatness is interesting - thanks for sharing!
Love this! Also think that certain streets (st marks, 32nd KTown, all of the Times Square cross streets) should just be permanently closed off to anything but delivery vehicles (and rebuilt as you say!). And that SoHo is the best place to try this out first I feel.