Another possibility?
As a follow-up to this post of the other day, here is a Montréal example (brainchild of Jean Paul Ganem) of a type of divide we could build to take back some street space in Mile-End. This shouldn’t be too hard to make, I reckon.

The way I was imagining things, we wouldn’t completely obstruct traffic from passing on whatever street we decide to work with…we would simply take back a half of the road for people activities (and leave the rest for vehicles to do their business).
Anyway, I kind of like the example from above (which is at the Darling Foundry, in case you haven’t seen it before).