The Globe ran a story last week about a plan to turn Hanover Street into “an Ital­ian piazza, with strolling vio­lin­ists, artist stalls and wait­ers with Valpo­li­cella and espres­sos scur­ry­ing to cus­tomers at tables in the mid­dle of the street.”

Yeah, it sounds roman­tic. But there are two problems:

First, there are the months of Novem­ber through April. I’d like to see who’s will­ing to wait patiently for his espresso in the midst of a howl­ing Novem­ber windstorm.

Sec­ond, this plan is almost exactly what the city had in mind for Down­town Cross­ing when they closed the area to vehic­u­lar traf­fic in 1977. For those of you who don’t read your local his­tory, you should know that pedes­trian traf­fic evap­o­rated almost simul­ta­ne­ously with the clos­ing of the streets. Lin­ger­ing foot traf­fic did not return until the city estab­lished an asso­ci­a­tion in the 1980′s to man­age a carefully-controlled cart ven­dor pro­gram cater­ing to tourists. Despite their efforts, Down­town Cross­ing never devel­oped much use as a meeting-place. The major­ity of the pub­lic space is under­uti­lized. Busi­ness own­ers com­plain about the logis­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties of being inac­ces­si­ble for deliv­er­ies, as the area was not designed with a sur­plus of back alleys or load­ing docks. The Down­town Cross­ing exper­i­ment saw only lim­ited suc­cess. Frankly, it wouldn’t be very dif­fer­ent with the traf­fic added back in.

But just so you don’t think I’m down on every new sug­ges­tion, let me throw this one out there: what the North End needs is not a piazza, but a Dutch-style woon­erf. A woon­erf is a mixed-use thor­ough­fare that com­bines vehic­u­lar traf­fic, pedes­tri­ans, and cyclists with­out any rules or guid­ance. The aston­ish­ing result is being demon­strated all over Europe: an abun­dance of cau­tion, fewer acci­dents, fewer fatal­i­ties, and opti­mal use of space.

Unfor­tu­nately, due to the Amer­i­cans with Dis­abil­i­ties Act of 1990, which man­dates dis­tinct and rigid sep­a­ra­tion between pedes­trian spaces and vehic­u­lar spaces—woonerfs are actu­ally ille­gal in the United States. Leg­isla­tive activ­ity at the fed­eral level is nec­es­sary to elim­i­nate the think­ing that these two modes of trans­port are fun­da­men­tally incompatible—a silly byprod­uct of post­war car cul­ture—and usher Boston’s North End into a new era of urban planning.