Could pedestrian-only weekends come to Main Street?

For more than a decade, city leaders and downtown stakeholders have discussed closing segments of Main Street to vehicular traffic on certain days in hopes of creating an open pedestrian environment with space for outdoor business activity.

Although the idea has never come to fruition, it hasn’t fallen to the wayside, either. On March 2, Downtown Improvement District board member Mark Kauffman said the volume of outdoor foot traffic made him wonder if the time was finally right to follow through on the possibility of periodically making a portion of downtown pedestrian-only.

“I was downtown last weekend, and the number of people walking downtown is just incredible,” Kauffman said. “The restaurants are full, and they’re full outside.”

Kauffman said the DID could discuss the idea in earnest at a future meeting, but he shared some preliminary thoughts on what the pedestrian experiment might look like. Kauffman targeted lower Main Street and Palm Avenue as segments where the city could restrict vehicular access. In addition to allowing stores and restaurants to spread out into the streets, he said the Sarasota Farmers Market could reconfigure its footprint to take advantage of the open space.

He suggested the closures could be in effect from Friday evening through midnight Saturday, and the city could test it for a month.

“We keep playing around with this idea,” Kauffman said. “We’ve never tried it. Maybe we ought to discuss it.”

Although this iteration of the concept is in a preliminary phase, there has been extensive research into the possibility of doing something similar. In 2011, public input at workshops indicated support for creating a pedestrian mall space on Main Street. A private group raised money in hopes of creating a brick-lined Main Street with retractable bollards to block vehicular access to Main Street. The project had some advocates, but it never advanced.

In 2018, City Planning Director Steve Cover spoke to the DID board about holding recurring pedestrian-only events on Main Street with changing themes. The DID expressed support for the concept, seeing it as their opportunity to compete with similar events held on the first Friday of the month in such places as Lakewood Ranch. Ron Soto, a DID board member and president of the Sarasota Downtown Enrichment Association, said he’d like to take it a step further than that.

“What I want to do is, instead of First Friday, do it every Friday,” Soto said.

At the time, the downtown group pointed to city regulations as a potential obstacle. They said fees can cost event sponsors up to $1,660 for single-day street closures, which creates a challenge for gatherings that aren’t huge economic generators.

Through a spokesperson, the city indicated that any effort to block vehicular access to Main Street would probably need to go in front of the City Commission.

The city would likely need to see support from businesses and property owners who would be affected, but the proposal wouldn’t necessarily need to go through the city’s traditional event application procedures.

Last year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the city approved three limited downtown street closures on weekends to facilitate outdoor dining space for restaurants. The city also allowed some businesses to use parking spaces in front of their storefronts for seating. In January, City Commissioner Liz Alpert expressed a desire to extend the regulations at least through the end of the year. The rest of the commission responded positively, and City Manager Marlon Brown said he intended to discuss strategies for refining the outdoor dining regulations at a future meeting.

“It seems to be working well,” Alpert said. “I think it’s very popular.”

Although it’s unclear if the commission will be as receptive to larger-scale effort to promote outdoor pedestrian activity, Kauffman believes it’s worth trying.

“It’s a cheap fix, and it could be interesting,” he said.