Let's Talk About Cities #8 – Car-free Zones
As we already talked about in episode #4 about Ecologically Sustainable Planning, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, aims to transform the capital into a 15-minute city in which nobody takes longer than 15 minutes to get to work or take their children to school. Along with this goal, it has now been decided that the city center of Paris should be free from private cars by 2024. The proposed area stretches out over 4 arrondissements.
However not all cars will be banned: Delivery, service and emergency vehicles will still have access and residents will be allowed to drive in the so-called zone tranquil to access amenities. The main goal of this transformation is to prevent cars from driving through the old part of the City. As a summary, one might rather speak from a drastic car reduction than a car ban.
Brussels
A similar plan to that of Paris was approved in Brussels in 2020 and will take effect for the central part of Brussels, an area called “the Pentagon”, in August this year.
The Pentagon is one of 28 meshes in which the areas of Brussels have been divided into for the purpose of implementing different mobility measures. An approach is taken which can be likened to the Superblock strategy in Barcelona on a larger scale - traffic is rerouted from residential areas to major roads, in Brussels mainly a ring road around the city. At key locations in the intersections of these meshes there will be parking facilities and connections to public transport. In the residential areas the strategy will rely on traffic loops, one-way streets and limited access zones, making it harder to transit through them.
It is estimated that this will reduce traffic by 35% on local roads, 10% on main roads and an increase on the ring road of 18% leading to an overall reduction in traffic of 4%. Within the perimeter of the Region, the reduction is 21%, which corresponds to a reduction of approximately 440,000 trips per day by car.
The Good Move mobility plan is a substantial plan for making Brussels more sustainable and also includes a focus on dense urban development, improved mobility services and reduced on-street-parking through removal of parking spots and increased prices. Last year the speed limit was lowered to 30 km/h for the whole city which lowers emissions, reduces accidents and makes the streetscape less noisy and more enjoyable.
The plan has undergone a participatory process since 2016, in which public and private stakeholders as well as associations have been invited. There have been discussion forums and a citizen’s panel formed in the Brussels parliament.
Such plans are not just a matter of making cities more enjoyable. Each year, nitrogen oxide from motor traffic is responsible for several hundred premature deaths. In a study of over 800 European urban areas, the Brussels region is the eighth most affected by nitrogen oxide.
Noise radar!
Other cities, like Pontevedra in Spain have been car free since 1999. When Lores became the mayor, he banned cars in the center of the city and paved it with granite flagstones. (Guardian, 2018) As the city only has around 80000 inhabitants and you can move around the old city in around 25 minutes, it's very suitable to be pedestrianized. Since the ban, motor traffic in Pontevedra’s historical centre has been reduced by 97 %; in the areas close to the centre traffic is down 77 % since 1999, and by 53 per cent in Pontevedra as a whole. (Eco Business, 2017)