Across the city centre, speed limits are low, pedestrian crossings are becoming more common and - in the age of coronavirus - diners are seated on sections of asphalt previously used by cars.

Will they still be there when the pandemic stops? Is Walk Bendigo about to return after a bitter fall from grace?

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Those are questions that could take on added significance in coming months as the council prepares to review the emergency policies that allowed restaurants to take over car parks and roads to safely seat diners during the COVID-19 crisis.

"In the new year we are going to have a comprehensive evaluation of what we did, see what worked, what didn't and how businesses felt about it, and the community," the council's coordinator of public spaces and place making Wonona Fuzzard said.

The council has no plans to bring back Walk Bendigo - the daring city centre vision that captured planning experts' attention in the late 2000s and included multi-million dollar revamps of Hargreaves and Bull Street.

That award winning project envisioned "physical interventions" to slow traffic and make sections of a number of streets into shared zones for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists.

But COVID-19 changes in Bull Street evoke some of the same ideas the council was trying to make before Walk Bendigo crashed spectacularly.

Both council projects allow cars into Bull Street but have used "physical interventions" to make the area more welcoming to pedestrians.

Yet even today, many people call Walk Bendigo a flop.

A 2018 letter to the Bendigo Advertiser letter by an opponent of the "GovHub" redevelopment of the council's Lyttleton Terrace offices put it in a category of many other "failures", and asked why people should trust it on major projects.

"Council wasted millions backing losers - tram around the lake, Hargreaves Mall, Walk Bendigo, Marong Business Park," they wrote.

Back in 2009, Walk Bendigo was so controversial that council staff were in a last-ditch push to convince councillors to keep it going.

Tempers could escalate so quickly that at one public meeting a councillor felt forced to "shush" a member of the public who was either talking or shouting (perspectives differed), and who had heckled a planning officer.

"You cannot let this madness go ahead. Have a look at the dog's breakfast out the front [of the library]," someone said at the same meeting, referring to a completed stage of Walk Bendigo which had created 90 degree parking in Hargreaves Mall.

Not every member of the public was against Walk Bendigo, but the debate came after an election when many candidates had been inundated with concerns about major projects in the city centre.

In the end, the council suspended stage three, which would have changed pedestrian access, car parking and the way cars moved through a section of Williamson Street between Myers Street and Pall Mall.

It has never revisited those plans, even if it has never officially scrapped them.

Internationally renowned planning expert Rodney Tolley was not in Bendigo to see the demise of a project he had been instrumental in shaping.

"My involvement had ended by the time stuff hit the fan and people started being very critical. Up until then there was reasonable unanimity with the council, mayor and planning staff," he said.

Dr Tolley - an expert on planning and transport - was on the speaking circuit in the mid-2000s when the council first sounded him out about his ideas to re-energise the city centre.

"I can't remember what I said in those meetings. It was a long time ago. But I'm pretty sure I would have banged on about reducing speeds, because without that many of the things you want to achieve are impossible," he said.

"You can't get more people walking and cycling if you don't do that below the colossally high urban speed limits that Australia has in comparison to the rest of the world."

More cars make streets less welcoming, faster speeds make everything more dangerous and on-street parking takes up space people could gather in.

Cars, after all, do not spend money, so why would you give some of the most valuable space on a street over to storing them?

"There's these cities where we spent 100 years trying to go faster and faster, but these are the ones that are failing," Dr Tolley said.

He believed Bendigo's most immediate problem was the speeds motorists drove at, but told the council reducing speed limits was not the answer.

"That doesn't work. We all know that. You have to design the street environment so that it speaks to drivers - so that when they're behind the wheel they have an immediate and obvious sense of how they are supposed to behave," he said.

"The streets were basically saying to people in Bendigo 'drive fast'."

The way Dr Tolley saw it, Bendigo had too few pedestrian crossings, footpaths that were too narrow and had just one "island in this sea of traffic": Hargreaves Mall.

"Understandably, more people were driving than should be, including over very short distances. The streets were noisy, uncomfortable and unwelcoming for people on foot," he said.

As Dr Tolley remembers it, the council was particularly interested in rebuilding the Bull Street and Hargreaves Street intersection.

"I think they felt that if they could score a win in that iconic space right alongside this magnificent town hall they could attract people's attention and realise that it was possible to turn things towards a 'people orientated' environment," he said.

That part of the project was a success. A 2011 Department of Transport case study noted Walk Bendigo had slowed traffic from 40.5km/h to 27.5km/h on average.

Dr Tolley said it was working very well when he last visited, but that there were a number of engineering problems that needed fixing.

"Some of the cobbles cracked. I think too that there were some engineering difficulties with the fountains, but they also had to be turned off because of the Millennium Drought," he said.

"That was very unfortunate because they were there not only to slow traffic but attract people to come play in them, watch them and so on."

Dr Tolley is philosophical today about the way public perception soured on Walk Bendigo.

"Australia's been hard because it's so addicted to cars," he said.

Yet that resistance crumbled instantaneously when the pandemic hit and councils in both countries began allowing restaurants to take over entire streets to minimise the risk of infection.

It remains unclear whether the world's cities will reopen roads when the pandemic ends.

"It's my view - and the view of many of my colleagues and fellow researchers - that that would be an awful, disastrously missed opportunity," Dr Tolley said.

"Even if you supposed COVID had never happened, we'd still have had to be doing these kinds of things to deal with the climate crisis," he said.

For all Walk Bendigo's shortcomings, it left a remarkably strong impact on Bendigo.

Dr Tolley said it helped fuel a push to link the city up to bike paths into the suburbs that continues today, "probably because it is not as controversial as taking up motorists' space and giving it to pedestrians".

But Walk Bendigo's aftermath is still being felt in the city centre too, even if the changes have not been as dramatic as in the past.

Streets have been widened, new pedestrian crossings and cycle paths have been added, and more trees have been planted.

And it is not just the council that has continued to look at ways to decrease the dominance of cars in town.

In 2018, Regional Roads Victoria helped drop speed limits on many roads in the middle of town to 40km/h.

Tellingly, Victoria's Department of Transport did not blame Walk Bendigo's failures on problems for motorists, instead deciding "a significant number of infrastructure projects in the CBD over a short period of time ... lead to negative community perceptions and changes in council."

The 2000s, it should also be remembered, was the period when the council completed its controversial $5.5 million redesign of the Hargreaves Mall, which remains a lightning rod for criticism more than a decade later.

So, what could come out of the COVID-19 dining review?

The council's Wonona Fuzzard said it was too early to tell.

"We could look at more permanent changes, or whether there are streets where ideas could have worked better," she said.

"But we have to work with businesses. There's no point in us putting any infrastructure in if the businesses don't need it. And that process would be gradual, anyway."

Rodney Tolley and Canberra-based expert Paul Trantor's new book Slow Cities: Conquering Our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability explores what happens when cities reduce speed limits. It is available from their publisher's website.