The street has three lanes of traffic in both directions, with a pair of streetcar tracks in the center. Canal Street's downtown segment serves as the hub of the city's mass transit system, with numerous streetcar and bus line terminals.Canal Street is often said to be the widest roadway in America to have been classified as a street, instead of the avenue or boulevard titles more typically appended to wide urban thoroughfares.

Or more than a century, Canal Street was the main shopping district of Greater New Orleans. Local department stores Maison Blanche, D.H. Holmes, Godchaux's, Gus Mayer, Kreeger's and Krauss anchored numerous well-known specialty retailers, such as Rubensteins Men's Store, Adlers, Koslow's, Rapp's, and Werlein's Music. New Orleans has historically been a center for opera, theatre and concerts. In 1871 the Varieties Theater opened on Canal Street between Dauphine and Burgundy streets. The building was renovated and renamed the Grand Opera House in 1881, which could be used as both a theater and ballroom. Theaters and movie palaces were centered around the intersection with Rampart Street, with the neon marquees of the Saenger, Loews State, Orpheum, and Joy casting multicolored light nightly onto surrounding sidewalks. It is reputed that the world's first movie theater (that is, the first business devoted specifically to showing films for profit) was "Vitascope Hall", established on Canal Street in 1896. By the 1910s there were several movie theaters open on Canal Street, including the Alamo, the Plaza, and the Dreamworld. In 1912 the Trianon, the first movie palace in the city opened. The Tudor followed in 1914 and the Globe in 1918. By the 1950s they had become lower grade theaters and they closed in the 1960s. Although most of the grand movie theaters have closed over the years, several cinemas on Canal Street operate today.