Welcome to Car-Free Streets!

Walking down the middle of a city street feels too good to be true at first. When I bring friends to 34th Avenue, they almost always ask, “Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?” There are no cars rushing past, no engines revving, no smell of exhaust. Instead, the street is filled with children on scooters, pollinator gardens, soccer games, anti-fascist organizers holding meetings, Zumba classes and neighbors stopping to say hello.

This stretch of Queens (officially renamed Paseo Park in November 2025) runs for 26 consecutive car-free blocks, stretching from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Junction Boulevard (also the official borders of Jackson Heights). 

The DOT originally closed 34th Avenue to traffic in May 2020 as a COVID emergency response, along with 200 other city streets. After five years of unprecedented popularity and sustained community activism to secure public space in Jackson Heights — which offers just two square feet of open space per person, compared to the city-wide average of 146 square feet— the city allocated $90 million in capital funding to make Paseo Park a permanent linear park in June 2025. Now, as the capital project enters its design phase, the Avenue’s future hangs in the balance and the city-wide or nation-wide implications of this radical experiment in urban space remain unclear. 

The 34th Avenue Open Streets Coalition and the Alliance for Paseo Park have emerged as the two leading community groups shaping Paseo Park’s future. The Open Streets Coalition (the DOT’s official partner) has managed the daily life of 34th Avenue since 2020 — organizing bike rides, clothing distributions, immigration workshops and a constant rotation of classes and events. 

“There’s always something to draw you out onto the street, something that normally you’d have to go into a building to access,” said Jim Burke, a leader with the Open Streets Coalition, Transportation Alternatives and Riders Alliance. “If we have a hula hoop class, we might invite the Department of Health to give a lesson on food handlers’ licence, or we might invite Elmhurst Hospital to take blood pressure and talk about heart health.” 

The Alliance for Paseo Park (APP) is more concerned with the structural re-design of the Avenue. In June 2025, the APP released their “Community Roadmap,” a 76-page survey and plan for Paseo Park’s future based on years of public engagement. “We have an opportunity to make generational change, and we want to make sure that the community leads that process,” said Dawn Siff, an APP Board Member. 

In October 2025, the DOT released the first prototype of their official re-design, offering two options: “promenade” and “meander.” Although they arrange car-free plazas differently, both options involve re-opening some blocks to cars. While some residents, especially those that live along 34th Avenue, rejoiced at the thought of improved parking accessibility, others believed that these options, far from the continuous green spaces proposed in the Community Roadmap, represented the DOT’s narrow and unfit perspective.

DOT’s Blind Spot

“The DOT’s… job is to move people and goods from Point A to Point B. The biggest challenge is asking an agency whose job is transportation to think creatively about public space,” said Donovan Finn, an urban planner and Jackson Heights resident. “I’m not saying they’re not trying, but it’s not the agency’s main concern.” Finn emphasized how high the stakes are: “If the design isn’t right the first time, there’s not another $90 million. We get one shot.”

While Paseo Park takes form, many are wondering how it could grow into something much larger. Jim Burke believes that this is the start of a “city-wide, interconnected network of Open Streets.” Through weekly bike rides with the Riders Alliance, Burke is identifying routes that connect parks, schools, cultural institutions, and Open Streets. This data will be used as part of the city’s nascent Greenways initiative (a collaboration between the Parks Department and the DOT).

Greenways is part of an emerging standard of cross-agency collaboration for public space. In early 2023, disgraced former mayor, Eric Adams, appointed Ya-Ting Liu as the city’s first ever Chief Public Realm Officer, along with allocating $375 million to create and improve public spaces across the five boroughs. Jackson Heights City Council Member Shekar Krishnan is hopeful that the new Mamdani administration will build on this precedent, saying “[Mamdani] shares our vision of supporting, expanding and being creative with public space.”

City-wide, permanent pedestrianization projects like Barcelona’s Superblocks have already found success in Europe and South America, but in U.S. cities, the bonds of car culture are harder to break. “The way we have been building dense cities in the U.S. is unsustainable,” said Clarence Eckerson, who directs documentaries on transportation design with Streetfilms. “We remain timid to implement large scale (car-free or car-light) networks that would greatly benefit citizens and businesses alike.”

Paseo Park is not just a break from cars. It’s a town hall, a museum, a marketplace and a living model of community ownership. “Open Streets means that we’ve evolved to realize that streets can serve more than one function… and that we have all this potential space” said Donovan Finn.

Anjali Deshmukh, co-founder of Street Works, an annual festival on Paseo Park, brings activists and artists together to explore co-creation through participatory art and discussion. She explained that the festival is inseparable from its location, saying “We use the street as both a practical space to showcase art, and as a symbol for democracy. Shared space and shared infrastructure…  is democracy in its physical form.” Deshmukh plans to start a quarterly permit training workshop in 2026 to further decentralize control over Paseo Park.

Jim Burke described Paseo Park’s effect on the Jackson Heights community: “Now none of us can walk a block without seeing a familiar face. We can warn each other if we see ICE, or tell everybody if we’re doing a food distribution. It’s become like a small town in the city.” Paseo Park has shown the tangible benefits of reclaiming city streets from cars. Its success is proof that New Yorkers are ready to get back outside, meet their neighbors and demand streets that are fit for collective life.

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