About Great Streets

The Great Streets Plan envisions downtown as the heart of Austin and its streets as the primary signal of thriving urban life, vitality, and vibrancy. Essential to achieving this vision is curating a pedestrian experience that makes downtown streets become destinations, places for interaction and spending time, instead of thoroughfares to pass through. The Great Streets Program aims to enhance the livability, safety, and aesthetics of Austin’s downtown streets by creating “streets for people”, a more equitable balance of space between the roadway and the sidewalk zones with the implementation of enhanced streetscape standards. The city’s transportation mode hierarchy prioritizes pedestrian travel, followed by public transit, bicycle use, and automobile use. All users, regardless of the initial mode of transportation, become pedestrians at some point, and the Great Streets Plan aims to highlight and humanize this hierarchy via the downtown streetscape design.