I'm sorry, but your photos depict exactly what I am talking about. Those streets that the cars are crowding down are narrow (to an American) with barely enough room for two lanes of traffic. Cars are parked with two wheels on the sidewalk. And even in the "hellscape" era, every door was a different storefront.
The streets may have been "redesigned around cars," but the distance between the buildings remained the same. And the buildings were built for small-scale stores on the bottom. This is what makes it feel like a neighborhood.
The conversion back to a pedestrian/bike heaven was natural, because the size of the streets was made for exactly that.
Compare to a modern neighborhood built around 5-over-1s [1], [2]. The streets are 5x as wide -- often four lanes of traffic and two lanes of bike lanes. And the ground floor is often built for a single store, like a large clothing department store. There's no reason to walk down this street, except to get from point A to point B.
Even if you decided to eliminate cars, the streets simply wouldn't make sense as a pedestrian area. They're too big, too exposed. It would feel like walking in an industrial zone.
It's not strictly the way 5-over-1s are designed, it's the way the streets are designed, and the way commercial space is designed.
> The streets may have been "redesigned around cars," but the distance between the buildings remained the same. And the buildings were built for small-scale stores on the bottom. This is what makes it feel like a neighborhood.
Sure, but again, that's all fixable. You seem laser focused on "the streets are too wide" but that's not actually too hard to fix. You can reduce car lanes, make the sidewalk wider, add more greenery, add islands in the middle of the street like SLC*, you can allow street vendors in front of the buildings, there's all kinds of things you can do to make it feel more human scale if you want to.
The key here is that Amsterdam had become a car-dominated hellscape and then there was the political will in the Netherlands to reverse course and change. I'm sure you're right that it'd be harder in the US in some ways -- but on the other hand, the US is also richer than the Netherlands, we have more money around to spend on such things, if we really care.
I see these sorts of changes as complementary. Having more 5 over 1's tends to increase density and retail availability in a way that makes a place feel more like a neighborhood, and yeah you might also need some other changes depending on the city, but none of this is unfixable, and having the 5 over 1's and the road diets are solid steps towards having that neighborhood feel.
Hell, if you're building an entirely new building there, one thing you could do is literally just narrow the street, let the new building jut into what's currently the street there.
The streets may have been "redesigned around cars," but the distance between the buildings remained the same. And the buildings were built for small-scale stores on the bottom. This is what makes it feel like a neighborhood.
The conversion back to a pedestrian/bike heaven was natural, because the size of the streets was made for exactly that.
Compare to a modern neighborhood built around 5-over-1s [1], [2]. The streets are 5x as wide -- often four lanes of traffic and two lanes of bike lanes. And the ground floor is often built for a single store, like a large clothing department store. There's no reason to walk down this street, except to get from point A to point B.
Even if you decided to eliminate cars, the streets simply wouldn't make sense as a pedestrian area. They're too big, too exposed. It would feel like walking in an industrial zone.
It's not strictly the way 5-over-1s are designed, it's the way the streets are designed, and the way commercial space is designed.
1. https://commonedge.org/in-praise-of-5-over-1-buildings/
2. https://commonedge.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/mid-rise-w...