Some want to see Columbia’s Main Street become pedestrian-only. Could it happen?

A department store Santa Claus stood, hand on the switch, ready to pull.

To Santa’s right, children and parents began a rallying cry: “FIVE, FOUR, THREE…”

To Santa’s left stood Mayor Daniel Rickenmann, leading the countdown.

“...TWO, ONE!”

And then there was light. Or rather, lights — 28,000 of them, sparkling overhead.

Downtown’s newest installation, a “ceiling of lights” above the 1600 block of Main Street, lit up the street to applause in mid-December. It’s set to be a year-round feature, and there’s even talk of extending the reach of the lights in the future.

But it wasn’t children and dogs and couples holding hands that first traveled under the newly illuminated downtown banner.

They couldn’t, really. There was traffic.

As Columbia’s Main Street continues to blossom, and as the city and its partners invest more in making the downtown hub a destination, some residents have wondered if now is the time to make the roadway totally car-free.

“One step closer to making Main St. pedestrian only!” Transmission Arcade owner Josh Rainwater wrote on Twitter in response to the new light display.

“I literally said this out loud the moment I saw it,” another person agreed.

Matt Kennell, president and CEO of Columbia’s Main Street District, has heard this idea floated a few times before. He can understand the desire.

“It sounds good when it’s a beautiful day and there’s a lot of people downtown and lots of energy,” he said.

But despite Main Street’s growth over the last decade, Kennell said the corridor isn’t quite to the point of being able to support year-round foot-only traffic.

There just isn’t enough stuff there yet, he explained.

“It takes a lot of pedestrian activity, a lot of residential, a lot of just activity to make it work year-round,” he said.

There’s no question that making the area more pedestrian friendly is part of the reason for Main Street’s success over the last decade. In 2010, the city completed $12.8 million worth of streetscaping on Main Street, from Gervais to Blanding streets, according to previous reporting from The State. In the 12 years since, Main Street has boomed. Housing availability is growing exponentially, and retail and restaurants have found success, too.

The city has found opportunities to lean into that success, closing Main Street to vehicular traffic every Saturday morning for the Soda City Market.

But Main Street still likely isn’t dense enough — meaning there aren’t enough people and businesses in the immediate vicinity — to make a pedestrian-only plan work full-time, Kennell said.

Research seems to agree.

Researchers at Cornell University in 2020 conducted a wide-ranging study called “The rise and fall of the American pedestrian mall.”

They looked at 125 pedestrian malls that were created in the 1960s and ‘70s and found only 43 of the 125 were still in existence. In their analysis of the pedestrian commons, they identified a handful of indicators that suggested whether they would succeed or wither away.

They found that sprawl — the opposite of density, in planning terms — was a major factor in the failure of pedestrian malls. A simple Google mapping of Columbia will tell you that, indeed, the city is quite sprawling. In 2014, a study by Smart Growth America ranked Columbia as one of the most sprawling medium-sized metros in the country.

The researchers also found that without a major walkable attraction already nearby, car-less commons were also more likely to fail. For Columbia, that may be another barrier to the success of a hypothetical pedestrian mall.

The area immediately surrounding Main Street is notoriously unfriendly to pedestrians. Crossing Assembly Street to the west has been described as “daunting,” and Vista residents have been pushing for lane reductions on Gervais Street to the south.

The state Department of Transportation and the University of South Carolina are also expected to begin a streetscaping project on the portion of Main Street south of the capital. When all of that work is done, the entire corridor should be more walkable, regardless of whether cars are allowed on the streets, Kennell said.

The Cornell research did find that the presence of a college campus boosted the success of some pedestrian malls, such as in Boulder, Colorado, where the flagship University of Colorado is located, and Ithaca, New York, which has both Cornell University and Ithaca College.

Though, those communities are much different in size and layout than Columbia.

“Perhaps someday, if downtown keeps growing like it is, it would make sense to do (pedestrian only,)” Kennell said. “But I don’t think we’re ready yet to do it all the time.”