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North America, the creation of pedestrian friendly urban environments is still in its infancy. Few cities have pedestrian zones, but some have pedestrianized single streets. Many pedestrian streets are surfaced with cobblestones, or pavement bricks, thus discouraging any kind of wheeled traffic, including wheelchairs. They are rarely completely free of motor vehicles. Often, all of the cross streets are open to motorized traffic, which thus intrudes on the pedestrian flow at every street corner. In a few pedestrian streets with no cross street cars or trucks deliveries are made by trucks by night.some Canadian examples are the Sparks Street Mall area of Ottawa, the Distillery District in Toronto, Stephen Avenue Mall in Calgary, parts of Granville Street in Vancouver (which remain open to trolleybus traffic) and part of Prince Arthur street in Montreal. Algonquin and Ward's Islands, parts of the Toronto Islands group, are also a car-free zones for all 700 residents. Since the summer of 2004, Toronto has also been experimenting with "Pedestrian Sundays" [1] in its busy Kensington Market. Granville Mall in Halifax, Nova Scotia was a run-down section of buildings on Granville Street built in the 1840s that was restored in the late 1970s. The area was then closed off to vehicles.
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