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Comment by SillyUsername | Hacker News Reader

Free parking, turn the centre into a relaxing space/park, with kids' playground.

Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.

Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.

They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.

To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.

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I'd replace the free parking with great public transport and cycling infrastructure. The parking spaces can be in the surrounding area, with frequent public transport between them and the centre.

Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.

> Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part,

Which European cities would those be? And I'm not interested by the tourist-infested ones.

I can only speak for places I've visited, but many Belgian towns are highly accessible by tram and cycle routes and come to mind.

La Panne / De Panne, Oostende, Knokke-Heist, etc, all have quite vibrant town centres, seasonal events, food markets, playgrounds, free-to-the-public pétanque/boules courts, you name it.

Then in France, Strasbourg has completely pedestrianised the town centre, which is similarly successful, although a little more touristy as you say - nice places attract tourists and shopping, it's unavoidable!

That's a bit of a problem. As the sibling comment insinuates, if a city has managed this well, it's likely that it will also get a lot of tourists because of the atmosphere. Bamberg would be an example that isn't one of the big ones like Amsterdam, but of course it also gets a lot of tourists.

If we're talking about shopping streets, almost 100% of them. Towns of a few thousand people have pedestrian zone shopping streets. (They are usually not doing well in small towns.)

Much of the city area, not many at all. Superblocks in Spanish cities come to mind.

Good public transport, common from 100k people or so. Universal in megacities.

This is it, and I have heard politicians talk about these same ideas for years in my area. Alas, it looks like it's easier said and done, because the downward spiral is still ongoing.

And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.

> Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.

Largely because no-one wants to go shopping then carry potentially heavy items on a bus or bike.

I grew up near Bluewater shopping center in England, which had plentiful free parking, lots of good shops that were open late and a security team which moved people doing undesirable things along.

Compare this to the nearest towns (Chatham, Gillingham, Strood, Rochester), where the (often Conservative!) council members seemed perplexed that people didn't want to pay £6/hour to park in a decrepit garage that constantly smelled of piss and walk past myriad instances of low-level quality of life crime to get to shops that closed before most office workers could reasonably leave work.

I haven't been back in ~10 years but I imagine the situation now is even worse and all of those towns are in the same category of vape shops, charity shops and empty shops.

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