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It is difficult to restrict this to deliberate car free zones since many "natural" or "historical" car free zones have often in the past (or recently) resisted attempts to bring motor vehicles in. Many Italian hill towns offer cases of subsequent legislation making the zones offcially car-free or of making the car free area larger, encompassing larger streets.

We now list examples of both types. --Erauch 03:39, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

- Car Free Zones are not necessarily pedestrian streets, eg sark, and so they should be kept as separate articles. jmd 05:30, 2 September 2005 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Is it within the Wikipedia norm to attribute the photograph in the caption? --Erauch 03:39, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No. We don't attribute photographs on Wikipedia. (Heroeswithmetaphors) talk 02:24, 19 April 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm gonna go ahead and merge these two article with a simple cut-and-paste. Banana04131 01:34, 11 October 2005 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Someone with more knowledge should note that the Northgate Mall is actually the first mall, depending on your definition of "mall". [[User:{jigabu killer}|Sycomonkey]] 23:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Stevenage was the first vehicle free zone planned to be so, in the UK. The distillery zone in Toronto, I have been there as my ex was from near there, and is not entirely vehicle free. Totally agree that car-free should be better expressed as vehicle free or something like that. Cambridge central area is car-free but still delivery trucks, rubbich collection etc is allowed and emergency vehicles. So the precision I agree is important. SimonTrew (talk) 10:58, 2 October 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

just fixed a couple of my typos. I should have put this at the bottom of the talk but don't want to do so before someone else sees it. Best wishes SimonTrew (talk) 11:03, 2 October 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The carfree movement now uses the non-hyphenated spelling almost to the exclusion of the hyphenated form. J.H. Crawford 1 May 2006

"Pedestrian-"unfriendly" is not the same as "carfree." Some areas that still admit cars can be regarded as pedestrian-friendly (such as the Dutch "woonerf" or "home zone), but these places cannot be regarded as carfree in the sense in which the word is used by people in the movement. "Carfree" means literally that--there are never any cars (but sometimes emergency vehicles and in some cases also delivery vans). J.H. Crawford 1 May 2006

"Pedestrian-friendly" as Joel explains is not only different from "carfree', it is also an important safety and quality of life activity in intself which merits its own place here. What we need is to improve the entry. (When I have time, he pleads.) ericbritton 17:38, 2 July 2006 (UTC)Reply[reply]

What about Zermatt

Zermatt bans internal-combustion vehicles (with a few exceptions for residents), but it has a number of electric passenger vehicles used to shuttle people and goods around. It is not totally "car free". TiffaF 09:05, 19 April 2007 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Santana Row permits cars through all streets - though there are wider pedestrian walkways than normal, and pedestrian sections between car lanes.

Using www.thedistillerydistrict.com to find the location of the district, and using Google maps' satellite view, the district seems to have plenty of parking space and roads. If there's a carfree zone there, it must be underground! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.136.88.182 (talk) 09:39, 7 June 2008 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Having actually walked around the Distillery district:

• Parking is at the edge of the district.
• The streets are cobbled. While they were open to cars when the place was actually a distillery, they aren't open to cars now.

-Dhodges (talk) 12:57, 2 October 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I reached this article from an article describing Akihabara, a Tokyo district that has several carfree areas. I think it would be useful to have a section of this page attributed to Japanese carfree zones.

This section sounds like the very biased rant of someone with an axe to grind -- maybe someone in the auto industry. I lived in a city with a large pedestrian zone and it actually increased business. More people went there, because it was more interesting and had better air. There was plenty of good public transportation. There were street vendors, street musicians, people setting up stands for their left- and right-wing political causes, outdoor cafes and bars with plenty of room and no auto exhaust to ruin your dinner.

In fact, in Germany pedestrian zones were mainly about boosting business in the central (old) part of the city. Bostoner (talk) 06:43, 5 September 2010 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I find the last part of the article to be quite inexact, not neutral and not proven by the sources provided. Conversely, the fact that pedestrianisation has not a negative effect on local commercial businesses and that it actually can help to improve them has been proven by numerous studies, such as these two http://tram.mcgill.ca/Teaching/seminar/presentations/Economic_effects_of_pedestrianization.pdf http://ecoplan.org/library/wt13-1.pdf#page=37

At the end of the Europe section, there exists a line stating, "Germany and Austria have implemented car-free pedestrian-only days (or nights) on the Autobahn surrounding major cities." I thought this sounded a little strange, making a car-only zone car-free, so I checked out the article. As I am to understand, the article said that this was a kind of one-time special event being considered (not yet implemented/scheduled) to occur once every few years. Is there another source that can back up this claim, or should I just strike out that line?  CKBrown1000 ^talk  01:58, 13 December 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I'm removing it. If it happened, it should be much more easily sourced. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:41, 13 December 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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I propose that Esplanade/Promenade be merged into Pedestrian zone or vice versa. I think that the content in the Esplanade//Promenade article can easily be explained in the context of Pedestrian zone, and the Pedestrian zone article is of a reasonable size that the merging of Esplanade//Promenade will not cause any problems as far as article size or undue weight is concerned. Also, personally I prefer merging to Esplanade/Promenade since the word meanings encapsulate the pedestrian sense already, with "walking" in "promenade" from the Latin root. Mistakefinder (talk) 11:57, 31 December 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Oppose - while I agree that an esplanade is often thought of as a particular type of pedestrian zone along the edge of a waterway or seafront, not all esplanades are pedestrian only - many also accommodate vehicles. The images shown in the gallery on Esplanade make this clear. As such, I'd suggest that it is better to have a brief section in Pedestrian zone lined by a ((seemain)) template to Esplanade. Esplanade is long enough to stand alone and could also be extended (esplanades have a long history - probably longer than pedestrian zones - which has not been touched on, to start with). Grutness...wha? 01:33, 1 January 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Oppose - I support the argument of Grutness. I would add that this may be a case of international variation. In US English 'esplanade' seems to be more closely associated with an area for pedestrians. In British English the emphasis seems to be more on the waterside location, although clearly there is considerable overlap. In my English home town the esplanade includes a pedestrian walkway but also shops, a park, a bus station, roads and houses. I don't know how this works out in other English-speaking nations. The intro to Esplanade seems to be written very much with a GB slant, but this is not indicated in the article. Perhaps a non-GB editor needs to make the article a bit more international, or at least clarify the variations. Naturenet | Talk 11:08, 2 January 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • FWIW, I'm in New Zealand, and my local esplanade also allows traffic - it has the beach on its south side, and hotels and cafes on its north side. Grutness...wha? 11:52, 2 January 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
• Strong oppose. In West Bengal, Esplanade specifically means Esplanade, Kolkata. See the links-in to Esplanade, which are a horror. We don't need any more confusion. Narky Blert (talk) 01:27, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

See also Talk:Esplanade#WP:PTOPIC?. Narky Blert (talk) 02:44, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Further: "The original meaning of esplanade was a large, open, level area outside fortress or city walls to provide clear fields of fire for the fortress's guns." Unless "pedestrian zone" has a modern meaning which I have failed to catch, that's a different idea. Narky Blert (talk) 02:51, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]