The European photos show long views, richly filled with detail, with either a bending path or a unique structure at the end of the line of sight … these arrangements inherently draw in the eye and feed a latent exploratory curiosity in the human mind. The US public spaces borrow from plazas and squares, not linear paths, and often greet the pedestrian with a visual obstruction that is largely indistinguishible from the rest of the surrounding buildings.

Now that the old Embarcadero is gone, I think Market St stands a good chance as a linear pedestrian boulevard, like Barcelona’s La Rambla. However, it may require more intense mixed-commercial use on adjacent streets to get to European or Asian pedestrian intensity. The Embarcadero Center largely fails to achieve this (in much the way Paris’s Les Halle fails), and the Financial District at either end of Market is excessively dead of urban life for much of the day. If the pedestrianized Market St is to extend up to Van Ness, the challenges of Civic Center and the pressured hotels (besides the broad recession challenges for retail on Market St locations already) would have to be addressed fairly.

Also, something needs to be done about the tourbus concentrations on Market and 8th St.

A lot of the small European towns chose to close to traffic more due to logistics – the old parts of town didn’t have streets wide enough to accommodate cars.

Anywhere other than NYC, any open space in the U.S. needs to be surrounded immediately by activities that will attract foot traffic 16+ hours of the day. As it is now, Market Street is so wide and significant that it creates a dead zone that sucks life and culture out of it’s surroundings since the entire corridor is so much bigger than human scale. All these wonderful models in Europe were built on a city grid that was originally human scale, as opposed to U.S. city grids that have wide, high speed streets everywhere contributing to a lack of street-side life. Large, centralized open space is far less important and far less helpful than tiny, distributed open spaces throughout a cityscape that make use of mixed-use planning and small-scale activities on the ground floors of buildings.

You drive to large, centralized open spaces in order to walk. Small, distributed spaces encourage you to walk around your neighborhood, making a car less necessary and creating more demand for good transit options.

No effin’ way am I going to proofread this rant of a comment

I agree that Market street is not a good candidate.

Although I love experiencing these pedestrian only zones in Europe, both as a tourist and my years living there I think there are limits of applying a European model to American streets.

I am old enough to remember the disaster of the 1970s where many small town downtowns were made into pedestrian malls across America. It was the final nail in the coffin of downtown retail for many of those communities. At that point the ONLY life blood to these small urban areas was the availability of parking. Taking that away and just providing a bench in its place was a disaster. It is imperative that we do not repeat that mistake.

The challenges that I see for it to be successful in the states are many but I think doable.

Homeless
People are not insensitive just because they do not want to eat lunch next to a person struggling with homelessness. Until an effective policy to deal with the problem of homelessness in San Francisco is enacted, public spaces and institutions will continue to become de facto homeless shelters. Whether it be our libraries or public squares, as long as they are forced to accommodate uses for which they were not designed it will limit their success.

Integrated
It is critical that pedestrian zones be integrated with a surrounding urban fabric that does not rely solely on the automobile. There are several examples of single block pedestrian malls that were put in in the 1960s in San Francisco that were eventually ripped out. If the pedestrian zones are not well served by the spaces surrounding them, then they won’t work.

Homogeneity of Population
It is important to remember that European cities are much more homogeneous than American cities. A diverse population has different ideas of what constitutes acceptable use of public spaces. Games and music might considered a vibrant way to share space within some communities in America, and yet others might consider it an intrusion. It is much more challenging to accommodate divergent communities in a manner that does not pass judgement on their values.

Weather
San Francisco weather does not lend itself to lingering outside. Southern exposure, shelter from wind all need to be considered when looking at establishing successful pedestrian zones. That is one reason that I think Market Street would be too challenging.

Density
You simply have to have enough people living and working in the area for a pedestrian zone to be successful. Sadly many people in San Francisco who yearn for the type of cityscape that would support a pedestrian zone frequently rail against projects that would bring the level of density up to support such zones.

Service Infrastructure
European businesses/shops often have smaller more frequent deliveries – in vehicles already sized for medieval streets. American retailers often have large deliveries in semis. That is not likely change.

I also think it is important to remember than the American urban streetscape is much messier. I am not sure that we should abandon that. I think that gives American cities much of their vibrancy. With that said, there are ways to shift the energy to a more user friendly dynamic.

There is an expression that we Architects use – “The three hardest things to design are chairs, stairs and public squares.” Pedestrian zones are not squares per se, but they are equally as challenging.

Imagine that pedestrianized.

I would love to see a wholly pedestrian street come to life in San Francisco, but I believe most of Market street is the wrong place. The reason is that high-rises are not inviting to community.

Examples where it might work are:
Castro between 19th and Market, potentially continued on Market down to Church or even Van Ness.

24th Street between Castro and Bryant. The unfortunate thing is that the shopping area is interrupted between Church and Valencia.

Some parts of Valencia street.

Powell street (despite the high-rises the street is always full of people).

The waterfront (at least Fisherman’s wharf).

Fillmore Street between Jackson and Eddie.

Columbus street in North Beach.

Stockton Street in China Town.

Clement street in Inner Richmond.

And lots of other streets that already get pedestrian traffic, that is there are already attractions on them.

Market Street has really no attractions (except around Powell BART station, but they are not community inviting, just shopping).

Perhaps with time, if the Castro/Market area becomes pedestrian, attractions will pop up further down market and the pedestrian area can be extended, but otherwise I think it will flop like the Chicago example you’ve mentioned.