> I guess it's charming because it has trees?
It's charming because they paid US Today to be charming.
It's an open secret that most "top 10" lists are glorified ad pieces where you have to pay to show up on the list.
[Look at the other participants](https://10best.usatoday.com/awards/travel/best-main-street-2024/) and it's clear that almost none of these downtowns are noteworthy. A couple are kinda cute, but this is definitely not the best in the country. Instead, we have tourist-heavy ski towns like Grand Junction, Ogden, and Ellicottville that *definitely* have marketing budgets to throw a couple grand to US Today for some publicity.
Just speaking as a Grand Junction junction boy, while we get some tourists for the wineries and mountain biking, GJ isn't a ski town. Powderhorn is nearby but not really anything compared to Vail or Aspen. When I was young, we had a great downtown, lots of local shops and a Woolworths with a soda fountain and diner. The mall came in and destroyed it. It has taken a long time, but downtown is pretty nice now. There are a lot of shops, a couple of music venues and lots of decent restaurants. I was suprised myself the last time I was downtown by how much it has changed. It's true that you can buy rankings (JD Power for one) but even if it's true in this case GJ does have a very nice downtown now. Just my 2 cents.
How do you like GJ? I moved back in with my folks in the Denver area and really donât want to live here long term. Denver is just too big for me. I like the idea of GJ cause of its proximity to southern Utah while not actually requiring one to live in southern Utah. (Southern Utah is great for visiting but waaaaay too conservative and uptight for me to deal with long term)
I'm currently living in Glenwood Springs but GJ is my hometown and still have family there and get down for weekends a couple times a month. The town has changed a lot since I was a kid. I am 57 btw. It has gotten much larger and crowded which isn't for me anymore. Nowhere near Denver levels of course where I lived about 30 odd years ago so I would say if you want out of the big city but still want stuff to do both indoors or outside it's a good place, just do your homework and spend some time there.
> Ogden
Their picture in the article looked like a parking lot, so I looked up the city itself on Google Maps and it actually seems to be a giant parking lot with a few houses in-between.
You can tell it's an interesting area, and only 85% of the on-street parking is in use, perfect for the person visiting from the suburbs. No scary parking structures./s
It's not a 25 lane highway, but the road engineers did everything they could to make it a stroad, but because the buildings that line it were built before the dominance of the automobile, and because it doesn't look like any were bulldozed to make space for surface parking, there's not half a dozen driveways per block, and this isn't really a stroad. But it's still a sea of concrete, with 7 lanes for cars, and what look like narrow sidewalks.Â
Two 8.5â parking lanes, four 10â travel lanes, and a center 9â turn lane. Thatâs a grand total of 66â of traffic to cross. At least thereâs 12â sidewalks on either side, but what a god damn mess.
These wide streets pre-date cars, but they are wide because they were shared by streetcars and carriages while pedestrians had far more room to walk and could cross the street at will. Temporary stalls and booths could be set up in the large space on market days. It was a true common space that got completely destroyed to accommodate a relatively small amount of high speed motor traffic.
We need to bring back the actual âshared spaceâ that our streets used to be.
I can \*kind of\* understand why American cities built wider streets and allowed for more economic activity on the streets, a greater number of transit methods (trams, carts, bikes, peds). Another big reason is fire safety â before fire suppression systems, the best way to prevent spread was to separate buildings. The narrow / crowded streets of old European cities were seen as âarchaicâ by early US planners.
Removing the multi-modal transit and dedicating 95%+ of roadway space exclusively to one mode of (space-inefficient) transit was a pretty dumb move.
America was also informed by Napoleon III's widening of Paris' streets to prevent/reduce the ability to build barricades.
It would be near impossible to get enough junk to block an American main street
Yep, and now instead of setting up temporary stalls for commerce and increasing revenue and foot-traffic, cities allow vehicle owners to use that space to store private property. Oh, joy.
yep, it's why a lot of those streets are called 'market st' - because they literally were markets
in philly, william penn made our two major cross streets - market street (e/w) and broad st (n/s) 100' wide so they could be used for markets and lots of other important civic things
Replace it with wider sidewalks, wide bike lanes on either side, narrower car lanes, and finally transit lanes in the middle with tram tracks. Then build protected intersections, continuous sidewalks, and median refuge islands for crossing pedestrians and transit stops, while properly utilize shark teeth yield markings on the pavement, and you have an optimally designed main street. Side streets can be repaved with brick, narrow lanes and wide sidewalks, and secondary arterial streets can just be smaller versions of the main street. So basically the Netherlands. Now you just need to tackle the density problem, since there's probably surface parking lots that replaced actual buildings all over the place, and then there's the buildings that remain with all of the upper floors demolished that need to be reconstructed.
Really telling how many of the photos in the article are from days when these streets have been opened up to pedestrians, not a regular traffic-filled day.
I think they're more so talking about the hordes of Americans who will rush to defend the "freedom" of car-centric design and get rock hard at the idea of brutally killing cyclists and pedestrians with their cars any time it comes up.
We can't do much about it, but a lot of Americans are absolutely brainwashed to think this is the best way.
I used to live in NYC and I just biked everywhere, couldn't stand public transportation.
Moved to Texas to start my career and it's a miserable car hellhole. I never knew there were places where sidewalks didn't exist in America since I was born and raised in NYC and my parents never had cars.
I am forced to own a car. I pay about $700 a month on car expenses (loan, insurance, gas, maintenance estimates) to commute to a stupid office where the work could be done from home.
I hate everything about this experience. I always say you can't say you are American if you grew up in NYC because you won't be exposed to this car hellhole and undiverse population.
On that level you absolutely can, street closures within a town centre are local politics and a small number of people can absolutely make a difference to that.
The photo of number 1 isn't even from the street. Sure, the building is next to the main street but the people are in [this mini park](https://www.google.com/maps/@42.6071557,-83.9279443,218m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) that Google calls an amphitheater.
not if you ask a geoguessr. My first guess, based off the trees and the no front plate, looks like atlanta or something but this could be somewhere mid atlantic easily
edit: itâs michigan lol
There are fully pedestrianized main streets in cities like my own, Boulder, as well as Burlington, Vermont, Charlottesville, Virginia, and others. And yes, they have trees. So much lovelier than any main street that maintains car access.
The example in the OP with five lanes plus parking is a borderline stroad. Doing that to your main street should be a crime. One million years dungeon for the planner/traffic engineer/local politician who decided on that design.
Even Fremont Street is better than this! Or like, Solvang (CA), or Main Street at Disneyland is technically a street. There are cool little streets in places like Dayton, NV and stuff, too. Really weird they picked such a dud.
https://preview.redd.it/jwbl879r59wc1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=21bef28224648b12c2969dbef596ce4a57080c1f
Lincoln Square's carfree area in Chicago is quite nice
Chicago as a whole has some of the best pedestrian areas I've ever been to. The 606 needs to expand to be the length of the city as far as I'm concerned.
Alexandria VA closed one main block during covid to allow restaurants outside. Is about to open a second as it was such a success with plans to open more.
On the flip side, I did see Eugene ORâs carless downtown die off. But was back in 90âs when malls were still hurting all downtowns.
State Street in Santa Barbara is a great example too. It's a beautiful reclamation of pedestrian space done by closing down the road, with boutiques, arts, and restaurants galore. It's the third space I've been looking for. Still shut down to this day in spite of the Mayor's incessant belief that it needs to be reopened for "business."
I get it though, businesses do struggle and pay $$$$ in rent for the location, but truly if local officials want to help struggling small businesses, why not tackle greedy landlords?
From a business perspective, rent ought to be cheaper in these places because to a commercial real estate operation, parking is a major factor in rent prices. As a landlord, you offer place to do business in addition to providing ample parking for customers. If the space is inherently walkable, your rent prices should reflect this lack of a service you're providing rather than upping rent because the area is trendy.
100% agree. I wasn't going to specify SLO, but was going to add that I'm surprised California didn't get a single mention on this list. SLO, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Cambria, Arroyo Grande, San Carlos (extra points for being permanently closed to vehicles), Walnut Creek, Petaluma, Woodland. I'm sure SoCal has some charming main streets too, but I'm less familiar with that.
Basically every small to medium sized town in New England has a street better than this one. Maybe this one stands out because everywhere else for 500 miles in all directions has the exact same stroad filled with strip malls, fast food, and big box stores.
As someone who lives in Michigan, I had a giant feeling this was in Michigan before I even knew where this was. I only say this because I find this odd that I almost definitely knew before I knew that it was in Michigan. I wonder why. Is this how geoguessers do their thing?
I think itâs the architecture and flatness of the area. It just has that Michigan/Midwest vibe. I should know since I grew up in Kansas and just moved here.
https://preview.redd.it/dxlm7cmfq8wc1.jpeg?width=1368&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e56074abfd8dfe9d75e9f8e74bc7fe66d885dc6
This is a charming street and itâs in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
A street lined with Jacaranda trees in South Africa.
Edit: Apologies for the shitty quality.
https://preview.redd.it/3j9992ejcawc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee9f3e1b68d2ec6e715ffeda37f59e40aa861710
....Well obviously there's thousands of good streets in Europe and especially the Netherlands. But this article is talking about the best main streets in America.
Itâs actually a really great place if youâre a member of the KKK.
Not figuratively.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/arts-culture/2017-09-12/why-is-howell-considered-the-kkk-capital-of-michigan
2 of those are parking but yeah. I live on a 7 lane street with all 7 being moving traffic (3 in each direction and one center lane for turning vehicles) and it's considered almost a highway where I live. It's definitely not charming, nor is it the norm, though it does have very nice tree-lined sidewalks full of benches and a protected bike lane. But it's a nightmare to cross, and you can only really cross as soon as the light changes for you because if you don't get on the crosswalk right away, cars will start turning and the drivers won't stop for pedestrians.
Can we just finally admit at the very very least that street parking is a failed experiment. Even for a car brain it is expensive, inconvenient, and unreliable. My towns downtown is a 3x3 blocks with a mixed use parking garage dead in the middle thst charges a dollar per hpur, but still people circle the block like sharks because how dare the have to waddle a few hundred feet to eat at a cool restaurant. Carbrains might actually have their heart beat once this month of that happens.
If you have to have cars in your downtown, just build one parking garage, charge a market price for the space so it pays for itself, and call it a day.
> Can we just finally admit at the very very least that street parking is a failed experiment.
The problem is that it works well enough in a lot of circumstances.
When the decision to implement street parking was made decades ago, it honestly worked pretty well. The real tragedy is that cars honestly are ok in nearly-rural circumstances and the mistake is thinking that they scale up to continue to be "ok" in more urban circumstances.
Yes, in a bustling urban space, street parking is laughably inefficient and only hanging on due to decades of cultural momentum, but that doesn't change the fact that most cities have to spend political will to eliminate street parking and it's tempting to spend that political will elsewhere.
I both love and hate Holland. It is such a beautiful downtown but right next to it, on the lake front is the garbage dump that is Padnos. When I go to the farmers market on a hot day I just smell burning grease
My family and I just moved here from Hawaii and my Mom flew out to go scout out the state and one of the places she visited was holland. The first thing she texted me was car lined big box store sprawl and I was disheartened. I was reading articles before I moved to MI that holland was this cute little Dutch inspired town (and to be fair historic holland is very charming from what Iâve seen from photos sent to me) but yeah, it clearly struggles with car centrism. Itâs too bad because itâs right on the lake!
They were mostly likely the town to pay the most for the review.. That, or the person who wrote this is speaking purely from personal experience, which was extremely limited to begin with.
7 lanes, none for bikes. this is gonna look like shit when it fills up with cars
you know everyone's just driving through this to get to the big box stores, blegh
I was laughing because I was like this could be my hometown.
This is my hometown. Lmao Reddit what the fuck.
Anyway itâs ALRIGHT and definitely the only walkable stretch in town. Itâs a town where there was so little to do, Walmart outings were the idea of fun for teens. Thereâs maybe 10 local shops, half of them closed most of the time, and like 5 restaurants of varying quality. The Dairy Queen and the lawn outside the courthouse are really the most âcommunityâ you see in the summers, which are short in Michigan. Kids walk to the library, public lawns or shops after school via the massive sidewalk from the high school in the warm months, but itâs like a 40 minute walk if I remember right. The rest is just people driving in and out of the nearby middle/high schools.
But winner of #1 in the nation?? That makes me feel BLEAK.
https://preview.redd.it/w437rdq2x9wc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=23a5caff4fa7c2f79d1a68f9eaf833994dccbe6d
it looks nicer in the picture they used.
I really dont like how weird American towns look. First you have these ridiculously huge streets and then its just one long road.
America is just badly designed from the ground up.
[Parking lot, parking lot, parking lot, parking lot, parking lot](https://img2.10bestmedia.com/Images/Photos/412210/GettyImages-1205154701_55_660x440.jpg).
[And Howell Mi has multiple lanes with street parking AND parking lots behind those buildings.](https://www.google.com/maps/@42.6071003,-83.929738,469m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu)
Yeah we have exactly _one_ street like this in my city and if i ever have to cross it i prefer to do it thtough the park it connects to. I can't imagine living _right next_ to this.
Itâs smaller in person tbh. And most of its parking. Sad to say this is one of the safest intersections in the town lol. Traffic only goes 25/h there. There are 4 lane long crosswalks on 55 roads just a couple blocks from there⊠much worse.
You could pick a town at random from a map in Europe and chances are very high that it's main street/square would be nicer than the winner of this list.
Weird choice. It looks like Anytown, USA. Nothing special. Could be my downtown in the NY suburbs which I would describe as â6/10.â (Because it opens onto a nice harbor, Iâd put this as 5/10)
I live in No. 6. That âpeds onlyâ situation they photographed occurs *maybe* four times a year for special events. I cycle that road on my commute to work and vehicles are parked on both sides, flying way beyond the speed limit, ignoring cross walks, ignoring traffic signals. Itâs an absolute nightmare lol. This is silly.
The most charming downtown is Staunton, Virginia. From May though October, they close the Main Street to street traffic from Friday evening through Sunday evening and all the restaurants and bars set up patios in the street.
Iâve been to main streets in multiple towns that are more charming than this one, and Iâm in the US. Go to any old small town in the northeast and youâll find small main streets with train lines running through them that are just brimming with charm
Tbh Americans still have a few relatively decent-looking streets, usually in older districts of large cities on the East Coast, e.g. in the Greenwich Village in New York. However, most American cities looks like hells that even Dante couldn't describe.
You know it does look like there are side walks and the streets are very broad preventing that congested feeling. But Iâm surprised the top spot doesnât have a bike lane
I don't know how representative the photo of Ellicottville, New York, is, but to me as a Brit who's never been to the USA, that to me looks rather lovely. The only thing spoiling it are the telegraph poles, but I can live with them much easier than streets rammed full of cars (telegraph poles are far more useful). It also looks like the romanticised image of what I think an American street should look like.
LoL. My hometown is on the list, and while the town has recently made a valiant effort to create a more bikable and walkable infrastructure downtown, it's still nightmarishly dangerous to be a pedestrian or on a bike anywhere that's more than 500 feet from downtown. I used to call it Shel Silversteinville because all of the sidewalks end for no reason whatsoever.
Howell MI???
Lmao USA Today is just running out of places to talk about. Howell MI is noteworthy for being a KKK hub in Michigan. Far more charming places to see within in Michigan, let alone the US.
https://preview.redd.it/t8mzcayttawc1.jpeg?width=660&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=50e4508d71d94f5f8d92b962b860494e24e18b3e
This is supposed to be the #10, I canât even count the amount of parking lots on 2 hands.
This has always confused me, when they widened the roads did they move the buildings back? Because in a substantial portion of these âhistoric downtownsâ there is pre-widening buildings.
I guess it's charming because it has trees?
And buildings
And sidewalks and all the shops along it have big windows and there are 2 floundering local coffee shops on the block đ„°
Donât forget the military surplus store, new age Crystal store, the seedy biker bar, and the less seedy family friendly biker bar.
What no vape shops?
Thatâs out a ways off of that highway exit, right next to the adult video store.
And lingerie shop!
And the questionable late night coffee place that has a few stale baked goods
And yet freshly laundered money
Over the road from Four Seasons Total Landscaping
Even better!
That's rare
And old / old looking buildings.
> I guess it's charming because it has trees? It's charming because they paid US Today to be charming. It's an open secret that most "top 10" lists are glorified ad pieces where you have to pay to show up on the list. [Look at the other participants](https://10best.usatoday.com/awards/travel/best-main-street-2024/) and it's clear that almost none of these downtowns are noteworthy. A couple are kinda cute, but this is definitely not the best in the country. Instead, we have tourist-heavy ski towns like Grand Junction, Ogden, and Ellicottville that *definitely* have marketing budgets to throw a couple grand to US Today for some publicity.
Just speaking as a Grand Junction junction boy, while we get some tourists for the wineries and mountain biking, GJ isn't a ski town. Powderhorn is nearby but not really anything compared to Vail or Aspen. When I was young, we had a great downtown, lots of local shops and a Woolworths with a soda fountain and diner. The mall came in and destroyed it. It has taken a long time, but downtown is pretty nice now. There are a lot of shops, a couple of music venues and lots of decent restaurants. I was suprised myself the last time I was downtown by how much it has changed. It's true that you can buy rankings (JD Power for one) but even if it's true in this case GJ does have a very nice downtown now. Just my 2 cents.
How do you like GJ? I moved back in with my folks in the Denver area and really donât want to live here long term. Denver is just too big for me. I like the idea of GJ cause of its proximity to southern Utah while not actually requiring one to live in southern Utah. (Southern Utah is great for visiting but waaaaay too conservative and uptight for me to deal with long term)
I'm currently living in Glenwood Springs but GJ is my hometown and still have family there and get down for weekends a couple times a month. The town has changed a lot since I was a kid. I am 57 btw. It has gotten much larger and crowded which isn't for me anymore. Nowhere near Denver levels of course where I lived about 30 odd years ago so I would say if you want out of the big city but still want stuff to do both indoors or outside it's a good place, just do your homework and spend some time there.
> Ogden Their picture in the article looked like a parking lot, so I looked up the city itself on Google Maps and it actually seems to be a giant parking lot with a few houses in-between.
Feel like you could fit in another car lane if you got rid of the trees
Basically r/urbanhell in a nutshell. Even if the place is walkable and vibrant but has no green everyone in that sub will cry it's hell
Itâs the nicest to drive down.
You can tell it's an interesting area, and only 85% of the on-street parking is in use, perfect for the person visiting from the suburbs. No scary parking structures./s
Someone should tell this author about this thing called, "forests" or "nature trails". Might blow their mind.
And white people
Which they didnât demolish yet to build a 26 lane super mega stroad of death.
YetâŠ
It's not a 25 lane highway, but the road engineers did everything they could to make it a stroad, but because the buildings that line it were built before the dominance of the automobile, and because it doesn't look like any were bulldozed to make space for surface parking, there's not half a dozen driveways per block, and this isn't really a stroad. But it's still a sea of concrete, with 7 lanes for cars, and what look like narrow sidewalks.Â
Absolutely not. The most beautiful Main Street in America is in issaquah  WA and itâs not even close.Â
Two 8.5â parking lanes, four 10â travel lanes, and a center 9â turn lane. Thatâs a grand total of 66â of traffic to cross. At least thereâs 12â sidewalks on either side, but what a god damn mess.
These wide streets pre-date cars, but they are wide because they were shared by streetcars and carriages while pedestrians had far more room to walk and could cross the street at will. Temporary stalls and booths could be set up in the large space on market days. It was a true common space that got completely destroyed to accommodate a relatively small amount of high speed motor traffic.
We need to bring back the actual âshared spaceâ that our streets used to be. I can \*kind of\* understand why American cities built wider streets and allowed for more economic activity on the streets, a greater number of transit methods (trams, carts, bikes, peds). Another big reason is fire safety â before fire suppression systems, the best way to prevent spread was to separate buildings. The narrow / crowded streets of old European cities were seen as âarchaicâ by early US planners. Removing the multi-modal transit and dedicating 95%+ of roadway space exclusively to one mode of (space-inefficient) transit was a pretty dumb move.
America was also informed by Napoleon III's widening of Paris' streets to prevent/reduce the ability to build barricades. It would be near impossible to get enough junk to block an American main street
Yep, and now instead of setting up temporary stalls for commerce and increasing revenue and foot-traffic, cities allow vehicle owners to use that space to store private property. Oh, joy.
yep, it's why a lot of those streets are called 'market st' - because they literally were markets in philly, william penn made our two major cross streets - market street (e/w) and broad st (n/s) 100' wide so they could be used for markets and lots of other important civic things
Itâs big as a motorway, wouldnât want to cross that one
Gotta hop in a car just to cross the street!
[I canât believe I have to drive all the way to work on Saturday](https://youtu.be/j304KUOK1dA?si=1aV34UlkiXq1-S2s)
Yeah, Iâll take the bus though
Buses? What are those
Theyâre like cars but you can pay a small fee to ride it and donât have to worry about parking or maintenance
Replace it with wider sidewalks, wide bike lanes on either side, narrower car lanes, and finally transit lanes in the middle with tram tracks. Then build protected intersections, continuous sidewalks, and median refuge islands for crossing pedestrians and transit stops, while properly utilize shark teeth yield markings on the pavement, and you have an optimally designed main street. Side streets can be repaved with brick, narrow lanes and wide sidewalks, and secondary arterial streets can just be smaller versions of the main street. So basically the Netherlands. Now you just need to tackle the density problem, since there's probably surface parking lots that replaced actual buildings all over the place, and then there's the buildings that remain with all of the upper floors demolished that need to be reconstructed.
And you can bet your ass that cars don't stop at any crosswalks
Or stop signs. đ
Based on the actual road it's not half bad https://maps.app.goo.gl/TS9Juf44W3jW62qZ7
As a person who lives here and has to cross that street like every day, it sucks
Really telling how many of the photos in the article are from days when these streets have been opened up to pedestrians, not a regular traffic-filled day.
Its stupid, hilarious and sad at the same time. But most americans are fine with it i guess.
Because they are brainwashed.
?? We literally can't do anything about it bruh
I think they're more so talking about the hordes of Americans who will rush to defend the "freedom" of car-centric design and get rock hard at the idea of brutally killing cyclists and pedestrians with their cars any time it comes up. We can't do much about it, but a lot of Americans are absolutely brainwashed to think this is the best way.
I used to live in NYC and I just biked everywhere, couldn't stand public transportation. Moved to Texas to start my career and it's a miserable car hellhole. I never knew there were places where sidewalks didn't exist in America since I was born and raised in NYC and my parents never had cars. I am forced to own a car. I pay about $700 a month on car expenses (loan, insurance, gas, maintenance estimates) to commute to a stupid office where the work could be done from home. I hate everything about this experience. I always say you can't say you are American if you grew up in NYC because you won't be exposed to this car hellhole and undiverse population.
On that level you absolutely can, street closures within a town centre are local politics and a small number of people can absolutely make a difference to that.
Yup. So close.
The photo of number 1 isn't even from the street. Sure, the building is next to the main street but the people are in [this mini park](https://www.google.com/maps/@42.6071557,-83.9279443,218m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) that Google calls an amphitheater.
If you ask 1000 people where is this picture located, you'll get 1000 different answers.
I mean for real. Are the trees even native?
And if you ask Trevor Rainbolt, he will be right.
âThatâs Howell, Michigan grassâ *smashes space bar*
âNiceâ
Smokes, letâs goâŠ
What do you mean? This is obviously AnyTown USA
not if you ask a geoguessr. My first guess, based off the trees and the no front plate, looks like atlanta or something but this could be somewhere mid atlantic easily edit: itâs michigan lol
I was thinking the same until I realized it was the correct answer. Now Iâm just ashamed đđ
The US has way, way better streets. San Luis Obispo has this beat by a huge margin for instance.
There are fully pedestrianized main streets in cities like my own, Boulder, as well as Burlington, Vermont, Charlottesville, Virginia, and others. And yes, they have trees. So much lovelier than any main street that maintains car access. The example in the OP with five lanes plus parking is a borderline stroad. Doing that to your main street should be a crime. One million years dungeon for the planner/traffic engineer/local politician who decided on that design.
Pearl is a damn gem.
Savannah, GA too. Great city to explore on foot.
Even Fremont Street is better than this! Or like, Solvang (CA), or Main Street at Disneyland is technically a street. There are cool little streets in places like Dayton, NV and stuff, too. Really weird they picked such a dud.
https://preview.redd.it/jwbl879r59wc1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=21bef28224648b12c2969dbef596ce4a57080c1f Lincoln Square's carfree area in Chicago is quite nice
Chicago as a whole has some of the best pedestrian areas I've ever been to. The 606 needs to expand to be the length of the city as far as I'm concerned.
And Fort Collins, and Ann Arbor, and Madison, and Asheville, and really any college town in the US.
Alexandria VA closed one main block during covid to allow restaurants outside. Is about to open a second as it was such a success with plans to open more. On the flip side, I did see Eugene ORâs carless downtown die off. But was back in 90âs when malls were still hurting all downtowns.
State Street in Santa Barbara is a great example too. It's a beautiful reclamation of pedestrian space done by closing down the road, with boutiques, arts, and restaurants galore. It's the third space I've been looking for. Still shut down to this day in spite of the Mayor's incessant belief that it needs to be reopened for "business." I get it though, businesses do struggle and pay $$$$ in rent for the location, but truly if local officials want to help struggling small businesses, why not tackle greedy landlords? From a business perspective, rent ought to be cheaper in these places because to a commercial real estate operation, parking is a major factor in rent prices. As a landlord, you offer place to do business in addition to providing ample parking for customers. If the space is inherently walkable, your rent prices should reflect this lack of a service you're providing rather than upping rent because the area is trendy.
CityBeautiful alt found.
I actually went to Cal Poly and lived in SLO for 9 years back when they still hated bikes!
100% agree. I wasn't going to specify SLO, but was going to add that I'm surprised California didn't get a single mention on this list. SLO, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Cambria, Arroyo Grande, San Carlos (extra points for being permanently closed to vehicles), Walnut Creek, Petaluma, Woodland. I'm sure SoCal has some charming main streets too, but I'm less familiar with that.
Don't forget Mariposa and others up by Yosemite
Basically every small to medium sized town in New England has a street better than this one. Maybe this one stands out because everywhere else for 500 miles in all directions has the exact same stroad filled with strip malls, fast food, and big box stores.
They were too SLO on the uptake
I mean, Savannah GA has some absolutely gorgeous streets
do they mean "charming" as in "cursed"
Ah yes, Howell, Michigan, home of the Ku Klux Klan in Michigan. Yes, really.
How charming
As someone who lives in Michigan, I had a giant feeling this was in Michigan before I even knew where this was. I only say this because I find this odd that I almost definitely knew before I knew that it was in Michigan. I wonder why. Is this how geoguessers do their thing?
I think itâs the architecture and flatness of the area. It just has that Michigan/Midwest vibe. I should know since I grew up in Kansas and just moved here.
I love the fact that the illustrations in the article show the street when it's closed to cars and full of pedestrians.
yeah lol the emporia one is great. that's not what emporia looks like at all unless the main street is closed for some event
https://preview.redd.it/dxlm7cmfq8wc1.jpeg?width=1368&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e56074abfd8dfe9d75e9f8e74bc7fe66d885dc6 This is a charming street and itâs in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
A street lined with Jacaranda trees in South Africa. Edit: Apologies for the shitty quality. https://preview.redd.it/3j9992ejcawc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee9f3e1b68d2ec6e715ffeda37f59e40aa861710
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....Well obviously there's thousands of good streets in Europe and especially the Netherlands. But this article is talking about the best main streets in America.
The Uithof is pretty shit imo. There are hundreds of better examples in Utrecht
it's telling that what's shit in your country would be considered incredible in mine :')
Itâs actually a really great place if youâre a member of the KKK. Not figuratively. https://www.michiganpublic.org/arts-culture/2017-09-12/why-is-howell-considered-the-kkk-capital-of-michigan
A few years the local council decided the 5 lane road through the town wasn't scenic enough so they made it 7 lane. It was deemed a great success
Surely, 9 would be even better.
It would be more charming if there were no cars, the road wasn't as wide, and there was an actual tree canopy. Just looks like any other street.
7!!! Lanes. unbelievable
2 of those are parking but yeah. I live on a 7 lane street with all 7 being moving traffic (3 in each direction and one center lane for turning vehicles) and it's considered almost a highway where I live. It's definitely not charming, nor is it the norm, though it does have very nice tree-lined sidewalks full of benches and a protected bike lane. But it's a nightmare to cross, and you can only really cross as soon as the light changes for you because if you don't get on the crosswalk right away, cars will start turning and the drivers won't stop for pedestrians.
Tbh this is the main intersection, largest in the town and itâs smaller in person.
they meant "carming"
Can we just finally admit at the very very least that street parking is a failed experiment. Even for a car brain it is expensive, inconvenient, and unreliable. My towns downtown is a 3x3 blocks with a mixed use parking garage dead in the middle thst charges a dollar per hpur, but still people circle the block like sharks because how dare the have to waddle a few hundred feet to eat at a cool restaurant. Carbrains might actually have their heart beat once this month of that happens. If you have to have cars in your downtown, just build one parking garage, charge a market price for the space so it pays for itself, and call it a day.
> Can we just finally admit at the very very least that street parking is a failed experiment. The problem is that it works well enough in a lot of circumstances. When the decision to implement street parking was made decades ago, it honestly worked pretty well. The real tragedy is that cars honestly are ok in nearly-rural circumstances and the mistake is thinking that they scale up to continue to be "ok" in more urban circumstances. Yes, in a bustling urban space, street parking is laughably inefficient and only hanging on due to decades of cultural momentum, but that doesn't change the fact that most cities have to spend political will to eliminate street parking and it's tempting to spend that political will elsewhere.
Silly even if we're just talking about Michigan with Ann Arbor, Holland, or Albion.
I both love and hate Holland. It is such a beautiful downtown but right next to it, on the lake front is the garbage dump that is Padnos. When I go to the farmers market on a hot day I just smell burning grease
My family and I just moved here from Hawaii and my Mom flew out to go scout out the state and one of the places she visited was holland. The first thing she texted me was car lined big box store sprawl and I was disheartened. I was reading articles before I moved to MI that holland was this cute little Dutch inspired town (and to be fair historic holland is very charming from what Iâve seen from photos sent to me) but yeah, it clearly struggles with car centrism. Itâs too bad because itâs right on the lake!
Total Garbage.
Their photo of No. 9: Hickory, North Carolina shows mostly parking lots.
I live in an unremarkable neighborhood in Portland (Foster-Powell) and our business district is more charming than this.
They were mostly likely the town to pay the most for the review.. That, or the person who wrote this is speaking purely from personal experience, which was extremely limited to begin with.
7 lanes, none for bikes. this is gonna look like shit when it fills up with cars you know everyone's just driving through this to get to the big box stores, blegh
Such low standards
I was laughing because I was like this could be my hometown. This is my hometown. Lmao Reddit what the fuck. Anyway itâs ALRIGHT and definitely the only walkable stretch in town. Itâs a town where there was so little to do, Walmart outings were the idea of fun for teens. Thereâs maybe 10 local shops, half of them closed most of the time, and like 5 restaurants of varying quality. The Dairy Queen and the lawn outside the courthouse are really the most âcommunityâ you see in the summers, which are short in Michigan. Kids walk to the library, public lawns or shops after school via the massive sidewalk from the high school in the warm months, but itâs like a 40 minute walk if I remember right. The rest is just people driving in and out of the nearby middle/high schools. But winner of #1 in the nation?? That makes me feel BLEAK.
https://preview.redd.it/w437rdq2x9wc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=23a5caff4fa7c2f79d1a68f9eaf833994dccbe6d it looks nicer in the picture they used.
True, but that picture looks like they avoided taking a picture of the street, which should be the highlight.
I really dont like how weird American towns look. First you have these ridiculously huge streets and then its just one long road. America is just badly designed from the ground up.
Hickoryâs Main Street is fronted by a huge ass parking lot.
Hahahahahah
nothing more charming than 7 lanes of asphalt
Thatâs like 80 feet to cross the street! How long do they give you on the walk signal?!?!?
I knew it was Michigan before clicking on the article. Most down towns in little towns in MI look like that.
Lol so true. Looks almost exactly like our main street in northern Michigan
Take away the streetside parking and put a few trees there.
B.... But look there are t-trees! A... a-and buildings and... five wide lanes so that no bike can travel there!
It is a airstrip not a street
[Parking lot, parking lot, parking lot, parking lot, parking lot](https://img2.10bestmedia.com/Images/Photos/412210/GettyImages-1205154701_55_660x440.jpg). [And Howell Mi has multiple lanes with street parking AND parking lots behind those buildings.](https://www.google.com/maps/@42.6071003,-83.929738,469m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu)
Damn, the "downtown" is like 70% parking.
Only 7 lanes smh
Yeah we have exactly _one_ street like this in my city and if i ever have to cross it i prefer to do it thtough the park it connects to. I can't imagine living _right next_ to this.
Itâs smaller in person tbh. And most of its parking. Sad to say this is one of the safest intersections in the town lol. Traffic only goes 25/h there. There are 4 lane long crosswalks on 55 roads just a couple blocks from there⊠much worse.
It is wider than a german Autobahn.
The most charming main street in the US is in Disney. But the people are blind to how great it would be to have that on their doorstep.
You could pick a town at random from a map in Europe and chances are very high that it's main street/square would be nicer than the winner of this list.
How is that supposed to be charming? It just looks like 99% of streets in North America...
There are 10 towns in Maine alone that blow this shit out of the water
If it had no cars and a median with huge oak trees I could see it
Seven fucking lanes!!!! That's a motorway in the UK
Most charming street. No bikes in the whole picture...coincidence?! đ€š
Lemme guess, no homeless people? And more importantly no bike lanes đ„°/s
Whoa hold your horses. No giant parking lots? No dying business because of lack of foot traffic. Thatâs not a real Main street then. /s
by the us standard this is charming because there are trees next to all the cars.
I seen main streets prettier than this almost every time I travel
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A main street so wide you need binoculars to see what's in shops on the other side.
This is actually pretty as far as murica standards go đ
Weird choice. It looks like Anytown, USA. Nothing special. Could be my downtown in the NY suburbs which I would describe as â6/10.â (Because it opens onto a nice harbor, Iâd put this as 5/10)
Yeah...looks like just about every other small city in Pennsylvania.
Monrovia, CA didn't even make the list!
That is a main stroad, a road at most but definitely not a street.
Those reviewers don't get out much?
I see empty car lanes going unused
Main Street Disneyland >>>>
why is it wider than a motorway
I live in No. 6. That âpeds onlyâ situation they photographed occurs *maybe* four times a year for special events. I cycle that road on my commute to work and vehicles are parked on both sides, flying way beyond the speed limit, ignoring cross walks, ignoring traffic signals. Itâs an absolute nightmare lol. This is silly.
If this was made for people there would be enough extra room to put an entire extra row of buildings on ether side
Yeah those clouds are ok I guess.
No Galena, IL?
Charming for cars perhaps.
The most charming downtown is Staunton, Virginia. From May though October, they close the Main Street to street traffic from Friday evening through Sunday evening and all the restaurants and bars set up patios in the street.
Iâve been to main streets in multiple towns that are more charming than this one, and Iâm in the US. Go to any old small town in the northeast and youâll find small main streets with train lines running through them that are just brimming with charm
Tbh Americans still have a few relatively decent-looking streets, usually in older districts of large cities on the East Coast, e.g. in the Greenwich Village in New York. However, most American cities looks like hells that even Dante couldn't describe.
Well the USA Today is hogwash
Church St in Burlington VT is much better
This is about as charming as a fedora wielding "mi'laddy" lad on the 3rd day of Comic Con.
There probably was a whole nother row of buildings that were knocked down for that stroad
Ewww I just threw up in my mouth.
Charming 7-lane road. Beautiful.
Holy fuck this is awful
You know it does look like there are side walks and the streets are very broad preventing that congested feeling. But Iâm surprised the top spot doesnât have a bike lane
USA Today? Consider the source.
Streetside parking, always reliable is ruining the appearance of a point of interest
We just went so terribly wrong. Something drastic needs to happen to regain our humanity.
Wtf. There's more charming main streets further up in their own list.
How utterly depressing.
I would bet a lot of money this article was written by AI
Did a car write this?
Are the people at USA Today on Crack? What is charming about this?
WTF. I just puked in my mouth.
They misspelled "carming".
I don't know how representative the photo of Ellicottville, New York, is, but to me as a Brit who's never been to the USA, that to me looks rather lovely. The only thing spoiling it are the telegraph poles, but I can live with them much easier than streets rammed full of cars (telegraph poles are far more useful). It also looks like the romanticised image of what I think an American street should look like.
LoL. My hometown is on the list, and while the town has recently made a valiant effort to create a more bikable and walkable infrastructure downtown, it's still nightmarishly dangerous to be a pedestrian or on a bike anywhere that's more than 500 feet from downtown. I used to call it Shel Silversteinville because all of the sidewalks end for no reason whatsoever.
Howell MI??? Lmao USA Today is just running out of places to talk about. Howell MI is noteworthy for being a KKK hub in Michigan. Far more charming places to see within in Michigan, let alone the US.
it's not even unique. it's just main Street USA.
A seven lane Main Street FFS
This is the âscenic downtownâ of every single small, Midwest town
Itâs a highway.
Christ this country is down bad
Looks the exact same as any other Main Street
https://preview.redd.it/t8mzcayttawc1.jpeg?width=660&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=50e4508d71d94f5f8d92b962b860494e24e18b3e This is supposed to be the #10, I canât even count the amount of parking lots on 2 hands.
Americaâs most beautiful stroads.
This is a motorway in most of the world. What even is this? America really struggles to build cities.
This has always confused me, when they widened the roads did they move the buildings back? Because in a substantial portion of these âhistoric downtownsâ there is pre-widening buildings.
Lol
That has way too many lanes to be charming. Does it actually have to be called Main Street? I bet I can find something better.
It saddens me to think how much more charming this street would be with 3 fewer lanes.