Photo: Marek Lumi via Unsplash.
Barcelona, 2023.
How do you get people to change behavior? Even if they know something is good for the world and good for themselves (driving less, for instance), how do you get them to do it? Often people won’t change until they feel the reality of disaster.
But as Andrew Kersley reports at Wired magazine, “people hate the idea of car-free cities — until they live in one.” He notes that one of the best ways to get them started is “from the ground up.” Read on.
“London had a problem,” he begins. “In 2016, more than 2 million of the city’s residents—roughly a quarter of its population — lived in areas with illegal levels of air pollution; areas that also contained nearly 500 of the city’s schools. That same air pollution was prematurely killing as many as 36,000 people a year. Much of it was coming from transport: a quarter of the city’s carbon emissions were from moving people and goods, with three-quarters of that emitted by road traffic.
“But in the years since, carbon emissions have fallen. There’s also been a 94 percent reduction in the number of people living in areas with illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that causes lung damage. The reason? London has spent years and millions of pounds reducing the number of motorists in the city.
“It’s far from alone. From Oslo to Hamburg and Ljubljana to Helsinki, cities across Europe have started working to reduce their road traffic in an effort to curb air pollution and climate change.
“But while it’s certainly having an impact (Ljubljana, one of the earliest places to transition away from cars, has seen sizable reductions in carbon emissions and air pollution), going car-free is a lot harder than it seems. Not only has it led to politicians and urban planners facing death threats and being doxxed, it has forced them to rethink the entire basis of city life.
“London’s car-reduction policies come in a variety of forms. There are charges for dirtier vehicles and for driving into the city center. Road layouts in residential areas have been redesigned, with one-way systems and bollards, barriers, and planters used to reduce through-traffic (creating what are known as ‘low-traffic neighborhoods’ — or LTNs). And schemes to get more people cycling and using public transport have been introduced. The city has avoided the kind of outright car bans seen elsewhere in Europe, such as in Copenhagen, but nevertheless things have changed.
“ ‘The level of traffic reduction is transformative, and it’s throughout the whole day,’ says Claire Holland, leader of the council in Lambeth, a borough in south London. Lambeth now sees 25,000 fewer daily car journeys than before its LTN scheme was put in place in 2020, even after adjusting for the impact of the pandemic. Meanwhile, there was a 40 percent increase in cycling and similar rises in walking and scooting over that same period.
“What seems to work best is a carrot-and-stick approach — creating positive reasons to take a bus or to cycle rather than just making driving harder. ‘In crowded urban areas, you can’t just make buses better if those buses are still always stuck in car traffic,’ says Rachel Aldred, professor of transport at the University of Westminster and director of its Active Travel Academy. ‘The academic evidence suggests that a mixture of positive and negative characteristics is more effective than either on their own.’ …
“Urban driving doesn’t make up the majority of a country’s car use, but the kind of short journeys taken when driving in the city are some of the most obviously wasteful, making cities an ideal place to start if you’re looking to get people out from behind the wheel. That, and the fact that many city residents are already car-less (just 40 percent of people in Lambeth own cars, for example) and that cities tend to have better public transport alternatives than elsewhere. …
“But as effective as policies to end or reduce urban car use have been, they’ve almost universally faced huge opposition. When Oslo proposed in 2017 that its city center should be car-free, the backlash saw the idea branded as a ‘Berlin Wall against motorists.’ The plan ended up being downgraded into a less ambitious scheme consisting of smaller changes, like removing car parking and building cycle lanes to try to lower the number of vehicles.
“In London, the introduction of LTNs has also led to a massive backlash. In the east London borough of Hackney, one councilor and his family were sent death threats due to their support for the programme. Bollards were regularly graffitied, while pro-LTN activists were accused of ‘social cleansing.’ It was suggested that low-traffic areas would drive up house prices and leave the only affordable accommodation on unprotected roads. ‘It became very intimidating,’ says Holland. ‘I had my address tweeted out twice, with sort of veiled threats from people who didn’t even live in the borough saying that we knew they knew where I lived.’ …
“Any attempts to reduce urban car use tend to do better when designed from the bottom up. Barcelona’s superblocks program, which takes sets of nine blocks within its grid system and limits cars to the roads around the outside of the set (as well as reducing speed limits and removing on-street parking) was shaped by having resident input on every stage of the process, from design to implementation. Early indicators suggest the policy has been wildly popular with residents, has seen nitrogen dioxide air pollution fall by 25 percent in some areas, and will prevent an estimated 667 premature deaths each year, saving an estimated 1.7 billion euros.” More at Wired, here.
What local policies for helping you use your car less would you welcome?
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