Downtown pedestrian malls were tried in many US cities and mostly failed. They were an attempt to make downtown retail competitive with suburban mall retail, by the former emulating the latter, after the former was already failing. They only worked when other things were in place that made lots of people walking downtown utilitarian, like adjacent universities, tourist attractions, and dense connected residential. Few people wished to drive and park near downtown for a quasi-mall shopping experience, apparently. Lots has been written about this, but one overview: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/revisiting_pedestrian_malls_scmi...