Open Streets Initiatives temporarily open streets to pedestrians, cyclists, and recreation and close them to motor vehicle traffic. Initiatives are growing in popularity across the US, with over 100 cities hosting an Open Streets during the past five years (2009-2013).

Evaluation has been lacking at many initiatives, making comparisons and lessons learned difficult to establish. Drs. Hipp and Eyler, funded by Active Living Research, evaluated eight Open Streets in the St. Louis, MO, region and have developed a toolkit for measuring the success of Open Streets initiatives.

Included in this toolkit are measures for communication, reach, activity hubs, participant counts, physical activity type and level, cost-benefit analysis, and local business evaluation. There are also examples of collected data, policy briefs and references to published work.