I also think that there would be many opportunities to do much more, but local politicians often aren’t brave enough. Which I can totally understand, since there will always be very worried people when you propose a change like that.
In my small hometown it took construction work and the resulting closure for months of one of the main retail streets with no bad consequences to traffic flow at all to convince local politicians in the 80s to turn that street into a pedestrian only zone (originally it was planned to just open the street back up to traffic).
In that way temporary experiments might just be a good idea to demonstrate the worthiness of an idea but I fear that closing something for a couple of days might just be too short. In the beginning these disruptions will always be bumpy and unpleasant, so you probably won’t be able to tell a good change from a bad change within only a couple of days.
In my small hometown it took construction work and the resulting closure for months of one of the main retail streets with no bad consequences to traffic flow at all to convince local politicians in the 80s to turn that street into a pedestrian only zone (originally it was planned to just open the street back up to traffic).
In that way temporary experiments might just be a good idea to demonstrate the worthiness of an idea but I fear that closing something for a couple of days might just be too short. In the beginning these disruptions will always be bumpy and unpleasant, so you probably won’t be able to tell a good change from a bad change within only a couple of days.