As I was sitting at a café in my hometown of Dijon in France, it struck me how different that street had become over the last five years. What used to be a dark and inhospitable link road between the centre and the inner ring road, had become a food mecca, lined with buzzing terraces of new restaurants. What magic has conjured this transformation? The street’s full closure to motor traffic.
Dijon is one of the many examples of European cities starting to embrace the Dutch way of designing urban spaces, focusing on the humans living in them rather than the vehicles driving through them. In 2015, Oslo was the first city to announce it was going car-free by 2019. In the end, it decided against a total ban, instead removing all parking spots and replacing them with bike lanes, mini-parks and benches. The move has drastically cut the number of cars in the city centre.
In dense city centres, where space is rare and expensive, it simply makes no sense to be using two tonnes of metal to move a 70kg human body. The benefits are clear: a dramatic reduction in pollution and congestion and a positive uptick in public health, happiness and efficiency. For example, the cycling superhighway along The Embankment in London could carry five times more people at full capacity than it would if they were travelling by car. The same is true for parking: one parking spot for a car can store 12 bikes.
Switching to car-free city centres would also be the single most efficient way to revive dying high streets. A recent study published by Transport for London, and conducted by Matthew Carmona from University College London's Bartlett School of Planning, showed that people who walked, cycled or used public transport, spent 40 per cent more in their local shops than car drivers. Streets that prioritise pedestrians and cyclists tend to have significantly lower vacancy rates. What we saw in Dijon isn't a one-off – the effect is backed by data and common sense.
Only a full embrace of new technology will make this radical shift possible. Removing people's ability to use one mode of transport is not acceptable unless real alternatives exist. Today, this is possible thanks to the advent of light electric vehicles – especially e-scooters, e-bikes and e-cargobikes – which allow people of all ages and abilities to move around almost effortlessly, and faster than they used to. Last year, Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, predicted in this magazine that 2019 would be the year of micro mobility – she got it right.
In 2020, cities that decide to ban cars will also have to embrace new vehicles – whether they're shared or privately owned – and one of the major capitals will go one step further and actually ban motor traffic altogether. There is an unstoppable momentum behind micro mobility, and cities that fail to embrace that shift will soon feel out of touch. Hanna Marcussen, Oslo's vice-mayor of urban development, put it best. She said, "A couple of decades ago, it was perfectly normal to smoke cigarettes inside. I think it’s the same with cars in the city centre – one day, we will look back and ask ourselves why we ever thought that was a good idea."
Martin Mignot is a partner at Index Ventures
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
