Streets & Avenues

The showcase avenue is a deliberate piece of urban theater, and a handful on this list were engineered precisely to impress. Paris's Champs-Élysées runs 1.9 km in a dead-straight line from the Arc de Triomphe down to the obelisk at Place de la Concorde; walk it westward at golden hour and the setting sun lines up behind the arch, and on the first Sunday of every month the roadway closes to cars and belongs to pedestrians. Chicago answers with the Magnificent Mile, thirteen blocks of North Michigan Avenue stacking landmark architecture and flagship stores between the Chicago River and Oak Street, while São Paulo's Avenida Paulista threads 2.8 km of museums and glass towers—MASP and Japan House among them—over the buried mansions of the city's coffee aristocracy, and it too clears of traffic on Sundays. These are streets to walk slowly, reading the facades; if boulevards are your thing, the same instinct for people-watching and street life carries over to the site's historic neighborhoods.

Some of the most memorable 'streets' here never see a car. Shanghai's Bund is a 1.5 km promenade along the western bank of the Huangpu, best timed for the half-hour before sunset when the colonial-era facades behind you and the Pudong towers across the water trade places as the skyline lights up around nightfall. In Nice, the Promenade des Anglais curves roughly 7 km along the Baie des Anges past its signature blue chairs—laid out by the city's English winter colony in the 1820s—with early morning and the hour before sunset giving the softest light. Venice takes the idea to its logical extreme: the Grand Canal is the city's 3.8 km main street, lined with more than 170 palaces and 'walked' by vaporetto or gondola, so budget for a boat rather than your feet. For many of these fronts the water and the food are inseparable, which is why a waterfront walk pairs naturally with the city's markets.

A third group is pure spectacle. Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo sends up to 3,000 people across at once and resets roughly every two minutes, giving you several attempts at the classic elevated photo; Times Square pulls around 50 million visitors a year into a canyon of billboards best shot at dusk and walked at 7–9 AM before the crowds; Bourbon Street packs thirteen blocks of New Orleans brass bands and neon that only really switch on after dark; and the Las Vegas Strip concentrates 30 of the planet's 100 largest hotels into 4.2 miles that reward the free tram and a late start. Whatever draws you, three rules travel well: wear real walking shoes—Edinburgh's Royal Mile and San Francisco's Lombard Street are cobbled and steep—duck off the main drag into the closes, side streets, and quieter ends that most visitors skip, and pick your hour deliberately, since the same stretch can feel like a different place at dawn, at golden hour, and under neon.