Fast Company - Adele Peters
Cities around the world are starting to see that
they’ll be cleaner, healthier, and just better overall if people–not
cars–are the priority.
In downtown Cairo, it’s not uncommon to see streets clogged with
cars. But in a proposed redesign for a central thoroughfare, they’re
hard to spot. Instead, in the
concept illustration
for what looks like the Egyptian version of Amsterdam, a two-way bike
lane, a sidewalk, and a plaza filled with palm trees replace the sea of
street parking.
Similar
changes are now happening in every part of the world. Some cities are
going further, transforming larger swaths of space that were previously
dedicated to cars and restricting when and where the most polluting
vehicles can drive. For most cities, the primary reason for the change
is air pollution, which now
kills more people than smoking.
It’s also a way for cities to tackle their climate change goals–and to
deal with the fact that there just isn’t enough room on city streets for
everyone to sit in a car of their own, especially as populations grow.
Here are a few of the cities transforming fastest.
Oslo
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| Cyclists on Oslo City Bikes. Photo: Åsmund Holien Mo/Urban Sharing |
In the city center of Oslo, former parking spaces on the street have
been transformed into bike lanes, benches, and tiny parks. By the
beginning of this year, the city had
finished a process of removing 700 parking spaces as
a way to incentivize people not to drive in the area, while adding some
charging stations for electric cars and more parking for drivers who
are disabled. At the same time, Oslo is improving public transit and
making it easier to bike. The goal: to reduce pollution while making
better use of limited public space. “Cities, like Oslo, have been built
for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne
Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, says in an email. “I
think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we
want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city,
it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless
traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”
Buenos Aires
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| Photo: ITDP/Fabrico Di Dio |
On a massive boulevard in Buenos Aires that used to have 20 lanes of
traffic, the center of the road is now dedicated to buses. When the city
made the change a few years ago, commuting times shrank dramatically.
Buses also no longer needed to use crowded side streets, which freed up
around 100 blocks to become fully pedestrianized, or pedestrian-priority
zones where cars are restricted and limited to six miles per hour.
Since then, the city has continued to add new pedestrian zones in other
areas, and is trying to keep people safe on all its streets. At busy
intersections, paint and planters help reshape the street to make it
safer for pedestrians, using the same kind of tactical urbanism that has
also been used in
cities like Boston
to quickly test new changes. “It’s pretty inexpensive and it can be
deployed quickly, so the public can judge if it actually improves the
streets,” says Luc Nadal, technical director for urban development at
the
Institute for Transportation & Development Policy,
which worked with the city as it made its initial changes. “Usually,
people adopt it fully. Local businesses find that foot traffic increases
and that their business improves, and eventually permanent facilities
can be implemented.”
London
As London grows over the next couple of decades, an extra
100,000-plus people will need to commute to the “Square Mile” in the
heart of the city, and the area will also add an extra 3,000 residents.
If all of those people drove, traffic wouldn’t move. To deal with the
growth–and the
air pollution problem it already has–the city is
proposing a new plan
that would eventually make half of the streets either completely
car-free or “pedestrian priority,” meaning that cars (and bikes) would
have to yield to people on foot. The city also wants to build protected
bike lanes on most major streets. Where cars are allowed, the plan
proposes a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit. It’s the latest in a long
series of steps to reduce traffic. In 2003, the city pioneered a
congestion charge, a fee that drivers pay if they enter central London
during peak driving hours. In 2010, the city started opening its first
“cycle superhighways” on busy routes. Since 1999, the volume of cars has
dropped by about
a quarter. The city will finalize its new
transport strategy this spring.
Seoul
In the first year after the city of Seoul finished converting a highway overpass into a
High Line-like pedestrian pathway
in 2017, 10 million people used the path and business improved in the
area, with sales increasing 42%. Now, the city plans to add new
pedestrian zones. Some traffic lanes on major streets will be converted
to bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. The city is also starting to roll
out new electric buses, and plans to have
3,000 by 2025,
while it also improves bus routes to encourage more people to choose
the bus over a car. A rating system for cars is designed to keep the
most polluting vehicles out of the city center, and by 2020, only
electric cars will be allowed.
Madrid
Unless you happen to live in central Madrid, there’s a good
chance you can’t drive there anymore. In November 2018, the city started
rolling out
sweeping restrictions
across the city center to try to address its air pollution and traffic
problems. Older, polluting vehicles are banned, but electric cars can
still use the streets. There are exceptions: Residents of the
neighborhood and disabled people can still drive more polluting cars,
and emergency vehicles can still access the area. Taxis that run on gas
or diesel can still drive in the area if they’re relatively new. But
when the laws started taking effect, traffic quickly
dropped 32%. The low-emissions zone is designed to be “a lung for the city in the heart of Madrid,” the city explains on its
website.
Inspired by the success, in late 2018 the Spanish government proposed
banning any cars that aren’t zero-emissions vehicles from
large city centers throughout the entire country.
Beijing
To fight traffic congestion and cut pollution, Beijing has closed 23
major streets to non-resident cars, says Nelson Peng, an associate and
director of the China practice at the urban planning firm Calthorpe
Associates. Where drivers are allowed, they’re
restricted
based on license plates: If their license plate ends in a particular
number, they won’t be allowed to drive on a particular day each week.
The city also offers small financial incentives for people who choose
not to drive an additional day. And because there is a lottery to get
license plates in the first place, most people who want cars
can’t get them.
Other Chinese cities also have restrictions on when and where people
can drive. In a new district in Xiong’An, planners have considered
banning private cars and only using self-driving cars that run on clean
energy. Visitors to the area’s civic center currently leave their cars
in a parking lot and take a bus to the center, where companies are
testing new autonomous cars.
“If China can successfully switch the [auto] industry to autonomous,
clean vehicles, I can imagine permanent restrictions of old-style cars
in large areas in the near future,” Peng says.
Paris
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| Photo: rabbit75_ist/iStock |
In 2017, a busy highway next to the Seine River became a car-free pedestrian pathway and park. It’s one piece of the city’s
ongoing work to cut pollution by reducing traffic.
The city also restricts older, more polluting cars from entering the
city on weekdays. By 2024, no diesel cars will be allowed, and by 2030,
gas cars will be forbidden. Intersections are being redesigned to give
people priority over cars,
and bike lanes and public transit options are growing. “I was just
there a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty impressive what they’re doing,”
says Timothy Papandreou, founder of
Emerging Transport Advisors,
a consulting firm that works with cities. “You look at the hordes of
people that are walking or riding a bicycle or taking a scooter down
these riverbanks, and you quickly count the number of people–there’s no
way you could move this number of people if they were all in their
individual cars.”
Chennai
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| A bike share in Chennai. Photo: Flickr user ilugc in |
Until recently, shopping on busy Thyagaraya Road in Chennai, India,
meant navigating through throngs of cars and auto rickshaws. But the
street is now transforming to
a pedestrian plaza,
which will be completed in the next few months. Before building the new
plaza, the city ran two trials to block off traffic and give people the
experience of a car-free pedestrian mall–something that is common in
other parts of the world, but a new idea in Chennai. Nearby, the city
also recently launched a new bike-sharing system. Chennai, like other
cities in India, struggles with air pollution, in part from
transportation. In 2017, the Indian government said that it
wanted all new cars to be electric by 2030.
Though it later scaled back that goal, it recently committed $1.4
billion in new incentives to help kick-start sales of electric and
hybrid cars.
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