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In the United States, an example of pedestrian-friendly innovation is New York City’s High Line. The High Line opened in 2009 and expanded in increments through 2018. Today it’s a 1.45-mile (twenty-two-block) elevated walking path made from an abandoned railway. It is exclusively for pedestrians, with bicycles, skateboards, skates, and scooters prohibited,22 and runs above street level along the west side of Manhattan. In 2015, the last year with publicly available data, 7.6 million people walked the High Line. More than 2.3 million of them were residents of New York City.23

The High Line has proven so popular that other cities have made plans to build similar infrastructure. In 2016, Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit that founded, funds, and maintains the High Line, launched the High Line Network to support and advise similar park projects in other cities. There are currently nineteen projects in the network, including Philadelphia’s Rail Park and Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. Another city with an innovative pedestrian-­only stretch is Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne’s 2.5-mile-long Tan Track loops around its Royal Botanical Gardens, and provides easy pedestrian access to shops and restaurants located within Melbourne’s central business district. Like the High Line, it is for pedestrians only and enjoyed by locals and tourists alike.