Romania's largest pedestrian zone is in central Timișoara

Venice, at the same scale#

Venice is a case of its own. Its historic centre has no streets for cars, and its lanes are mapped as footpaths rather than pedestrian streets, so it is not in the ranking. Measured under the same rule but counting every lane, bridge and square, its continuous zone is 86 ha, 11 times Timișoara's.

Its longest walk without meeting a street with traffic is 5.4 km: from Viale Quattro Novembre, at Sant'Elena, to the San Basilio landing.

Milestones in the history of pedestrian streets#

1. 1953On 9 October the Lijnbaan opens in Rotterdam, described as the first purpose-built pedestrian shopping street in Europe.
2. 1962On 17 November Copenhagen's Strøget becomes a pedestrian zone, as a trial; permanently from 1964.
3. 1972On 30 June Munich opens its Neuhauser–Kaufinger pedestrian zone, a few weeks before the Olympic Games.
4. 1974Vienna's Kärntner Straße becomes pedestrian while the metro is being built.
5. 2007Ljubljana starts taking cars out of its centre; since then the zone has grown more than sevenfold, to about 10 ha.
6. 2013–2015Timișoara rebuilds Piața Unirii, Piața Libertății, Piața Sfântul Gheorghe and the streets between them: a 4.6 ha site costing about €14.7 million, after which ten streets were to become pedestrian by July 2015.
7. 2015On 29 June Brussels closes its central boulevards to cars.
8. 2025On 3 February Brașov closes its historic centre to cars without a permit.

How it was measured#

The map. All zones come from OpenStreetMap: the Romania extract of 30 October 2026 and city and regional extracts for the rest of Europe from 3–5 November 2026. A pedestrian zone is made of the streets and squares mapped as pedestrian (the OpenStreetMap tag highway=pedestrian, including areas drawn as such). Where a street is drawn as a line, its width is the distance between the building fronts on either side, measured every 8 m; where no front stands within 22 m, the street counts as 5 m wide, so broad boulevards with set-back buildings come out smaller than they are.

A continuous zone. The surface is cut at every street with traffic (residential streets and above; streets mapped as access-only, residents-only or deliveries-only do not cut). Buildings and the gardens inside squares are subtracted. The "longest walk" is the longest walking distance between two points of the same zone without leaving it.

What is left out. For each town the zone is the largest one with a street or square name, within 2.5 km of the centre, lined by buildings, that is not a mall plaza or paths between blocks of flats. That leaves out park paths, riverside promenades (as in Tulcea or Sulina) and institutional forecourts.

How sure the numbers are. Where the same street is mapped both as a line and as a drawn area, the width estimated from building fronts differs from the drawn width by 0.7 m at the median (129 streets). The ranking was redone in nine variants: without cuts at streets, with wider or narrower streets, with the gardens in squares, without streets open to deliveries. Timișoara is first in all of them, with 1.8–2.0 times the area of second place. Places 2–4 (Sibiu, Brașov, Bucharest) change order between variants. In Brașov and Craiova much of the area comes from the estimated width of streets drawn as lines, where the check above cannot be made; in Timișoara 98% of the area is drawn directly on the map. The European ranking was computed in one variant only.

What may be missing. The map is made by volunteers. A street that became pedestrian but is still mapped as an ordinary street is missing here. Brașov, for example, closed its historic centre to drivers without a permit on 3 February 2025, but the permit streets are not pedestrian: residents and deliveries still drive on them. If a street is missing in your town, it can be fixed in OpenStreetMap and will appear at the next update.

Sources#

1. OpenStreetMap contributors: Romania extract, Geofabrik, 30 October 2026; city and regional extracts from BBBike and Geofabrik, 3–5 November 2026. ODbL licence. openstreetmap.org/copyright
2. Romanian municipal boundaries (ANCPI, 2025) and 2021 census population (INS).
3. VRT News, "Brussels boasts second-biggest pedestrian area in Europe after Venice", 28 June 2015. vrt.be
4. European Commission, Urban Mobility Observatory, "Pedestrianisation of Ljubljana city centre". urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu
5. Adevărul, "Orașul din România cu cel mai lung șir de…", 25 September 2018. adevarul.ro
6. Guinness World Records, "Largest car-free urban area (by population)", 16 October 2009. guinnessworldrecords.com
7. Capital, "Mașinile vor avea interzis în centru…", 30 January 2025 (Brașov). capital.ro
8. Economica.net, "Timișoara: șantier de 4,6 hectare pentru reabilitarea centrului istoric", 28 October 2013. economica.net
9. muenchen.de, pedestrian zone Neuhauser Straße and Kaufingerstraße. muenchen.de
10. Wikipedia: Lijnbaan, Strøget, Kärntner Straße.