Passyunk should be car free—prove me wrong

Walk down Passyunk Avenue on a Friday night. Actually, scratch that—try to walk down Passyunk Avenue on a Friday night. You’ll spend half the time stepping off the curb to get around people waiting for tables, then dodging delivery drivers double-parked with their hazards on like that makes it legal, and flattening yourself against a building so an SUV can squeeze through a street that was never, ever built for it.

Passyunk Avenue is one of the best streets in Philadelphia. It might be one of the best streets in the country. And we’re wasting it on cars.

I’ve been turning this over in my head for months. Every time I walk the diagonal—from Pat’s and Geno’s down past the Singing Fountain, past all the fun triangles where the grid doesn’t know what to do with itself—I try to come up with a good reason to keep cars on it. I keep coming up empty.

So here’s the take: make the full Passyunk diagonal car-free. Not just East Passyunk Crossing. Not just a weekend closure. The whole thing. And if you think I’m wrong, I genuinely want to hear it—because I’ve been arguing with myself and losing.

Here’s what’s wild about Passyunk: it already functions like a pedestrian street half the time. The sidewalks are packed. The restaurants spill out onto every available inch. The Singing Fountain plaza is basically a public living room from May through October.

The cars aren’t enabling any of this. They’re just... there.

In the best of times, the cars are crawling through at 7 mph, looking for parking that doesn’t exist, honking at people who dare to cross midblock to get to the wine bar across the street.

In the worst of times, they’re tearing through it at lethal speeds, faster than funds dry up for Vision Zero in a given year.

The vehicles are guests at a party they weren’t invited to, refusing to read the room.

And the diagonal itself—that’s the magic. Passyunk cuts across the grid at an angle, which means it creates these gorgeous triangular intersections and oddly shaped plazas that don’t really work as intersections at all. They work as gathering spaces. They work as places to put a bench, a tree, a guy selling water ice out of a cart. What they don’t work as is places to route car traffic. The geometry is literally fighting us on this, and the geometry is right.

So if we say cars make Passyunk suck, what do we say about the cars that cross it? If you ask me: yeah, no cars on any of the side streets either. You’d create an entire network of pedestrian space radiating off the diagonal. Little pocket plazas. Space for the restaurants that are currently crammed onto Passyunk’s narrow sidewalks to actually spread out. Room for the neighborhood to breathe.

That would immediately make every single piece of land along Passyunk a highly desirable place to live. “But home prices!” you might say—so build more, my friends. Let the people live where it’s nice to live. Don’t make places suck to live just so you don’t have to see change—make it nicer, and make it so more people can afford to live there.

I digress—let’s say we want to allow local access to those roads. Here’s the practical version of this that could happen tomorrow: bollards.

Put them at every other cross street along the diagonal. Not every intersection—every other one. Cars can still access the blocks between them for residents and deliveries. But you can’t treat Passyunk as a two-mile straightaway anymore. You can’t gun it down the diagonal at midnight because the road itself won’t let you.

Bikes and people pass right through. Cars have to go around.

That’s it. That’s the intervention. Concrete posts every few blocks, and suddenly Passyunk goes from a street that tolerates cars to a street that’s designed for the people who are already there.

And here’s what it looks like when that intervention doesn’t happen: the Queen Village Neighbors Association (an NA I find to be a friend of the cause) held a community meeting specifically about the triangle where 6th Street, Queen Street, and Passyunk collide—one of those exact spots the geometry is screaming at us about. Neighbors correctly said it was dangerous. The ideas on the table: better signage. Large planters. Maybe a green space to “better define the intersection for drivers.”

Yet from one of the neighbors associations most amenable to people-first, urbanist plays in the city, the boldest ask was flex posts and some stop signs.

This criticism isn’t for the neighbors who showed up—it’s criticism for the premise that cars must be a part of the equation for every space in the city. When the automobile is assumed, the best you can advocate for is gentle suggestion—a planter here, a curb bump there. The parking stays. The through-traffic stays. The danger stays. That intersection is still a mess because that meeting couldn’t name the actual problem out loud.

One thing that makes this easier than it sounds: Passyunk isn’t a through street in any meaningful sense. The diagonal doesn’t connect to a highway on-ramp. It doesn’t serve as a major truck route. It’s not how you get crosstown.

If you’re driving down Passyunk, you’re either going to Passyunk or you’re taking the wrong route. The nearby streets—Broad, 13th, Snyder, Tasker—handle the actual traffic loads. Passyunk is already a local street pretending to be a real road, and it’s doing a bad job at both.

Removing cars doesn’t require rerouting a major artery. It requires acknowledging that this particular street has already chosen what it wants to be. We just haven’t let it.

Picture this.

It’s a Saturday in June. You walk onto Passyunk from 11th Street and the first thing you notice is the sound—or the lack of it. No engines. No honking. Just people. Music drifting from somewhere. Kids running ahead of their parents toward the Singing Fountain, which now sits in the middle of a real plaza instead of a traffic island you have to sprint to.

The whole diagonal is open. Restaurants have tables three rows deep. A bookshop has a cart outside. There’s a farmers market in one of the triangle plazas where, right now, four cars are usually wedged into spots that shouldn’t exist. Someone is playing accordion, which you’re choosing to enjoy rather than be annoyed by, because you’re in a good mood, because you’re walking down one of the most beautiful streets in America and no one is trying to parallel park into your kneecaps.

You stop for a coffee. You sit outside. A breeze comes through because there’s actually airflow now that the street isn’t a canyon of parked metal. You can see all the way down the avenue to where it bends—that long, gentle curve that’s been here since before the grid, since before the cars, since this was a Lenape trail cutting through the woods.

This is what the street is asking to be.

Fair. You can’t just slap a “NO CARS” sign on two miles of commercial corridor and call it done. Here’s what actually needs to happen:

Delivery windows. Early morning commercial access—say, before 10 AM—for trucks and suppliers. This is standard practice in every car-free district on earth. Your restaurant still gets its produce. The beer distributor still makes the drop. Then the street belongs to people.

Emergency access stays. Fire trucks, ambulances—obviously. Car-free doesn’t mean inaccessible. It means prioritized.

ADA and mobility access. This is non-negotiable and also not hard. Designated drop-off points at regular intervals along the corridor. Accessible transit stops. Golf-cart-style shuttles for anyone who needs them. The goal is to make it easier for people with mobility challenges to use the street, not harder—and right now, dodging cars on a narrow sidewalk is not exactly accessible.

Residential access for the blocks that have homes. Timed permits, low-speed access, the usual playbook. People who live on Passyunk can get to their front doors. They don’t need a two-lane dragstrip to do it.

None of this is theoretical. Cities have solved these exact problems. We’re not inventing car-free streets in 2026—we’re catching up to them.

Passyunk Avenue is a gift. It’s a pre-colonial path that happens to cut through one of the densest, most vibrant neighborhoods in Philadelphia. It creates public spaces by accident—triangles and plazas that beg to be activated. It has the restaurant density, the foot traffic, and the neighborhood love to support a car-free transformation tomorrow.

And instead, we’re using it as an opera house for car horns with excellent wine bars.

I’m not saying this would be easy. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be fights at community meetings, business owners worried about change, council members who don’t want to touch it. All of that will happen.

But someone has to say the obvious thing out loud: the cars are the worst part of Passyunk Avenue. Remove them, and you have something that people travel across the world to experience. Keep them, and you have a great street that’s settling for being merely good.

Tell me I’m wrong. Seriously—hit reply and make the case for cars on Passyunk. I want the strongest argument you’ve got. Because I’ve been looking for one, and I can’t find it.

Let’s make driving suck less.