[Photo courtesy of Streetsblog]

All sarcasm aside–and we admit to having had some fun with photos showing fairly deserted pedestrian zones on Montague Street and Bedford Avenue–are the experiments actually a success. Aaron Naparstek, who knows a little something about livable streets and pedestrian issues, argues on Streetsblog that crowd scenes shouldn’t be the way we judge the Summer Streets experiments. In fact, he says that they’re supposed to be a fairly peaceful place for people to enjoy themselves. Here’s what he writes, in part:

what’s with this idea that for a Summer Streets event to be considered successful, it needs to attract a “throng?” Jamming large crowds into small spaces has never been a big challenge in this town. The whole idea of Summer Streets, as I understand it, is to give New Yorkers a bit of room to breathe and space to walk, bike, play or simply sit down and relax. You want a throng? Try Midtown.

Here’s a modest proposal for evaluating the success of a Summer Streets event…Measure the amount of time kids are able to run and play without their parents having to worry about them being hit by a car, the number of friends you bump into and new people you meet, the pounds of automobile exhaust and carbon that are not spewed into the hot summer air, the volume of horn-honking, engine-revving and boom stereos you’re not hearing, and whether local merchants are happy about the event and making more money than they usually do on a slow summer weekend.

We’d still argue that there’s a happy medium between some of the emptiness that’s been pictured and street fair-like crowds. We’ve always been huge fans of pedestrianization and of making neighborhood streets more friendly to people. Here’s hoping that one of the Summer Streets days will be a nice one that encourages more people to come out instead of staying indoors with the AC turned up.