For decades technology has been trying to solve our car problem. We’ve got electric cars, autonomous cars and, for some reason, flying cars, but what if the best thing we could do with cars is get rid of them altogether?
Cities across the world have been testing this theory in various forms. New York recently became the first US city to implement a congestion charge, in January Milan started rolling out a series of diesel car bans, while Bogota has been restricting car use since 1998, when people’s clothing started getting dirty just from being outside.
London added an ultra low emissions zone this year to keep dirtier cars out of the centre, and on Sunday September 22, 2019, the city went car free for the first time. Twenty kilometres of central London roads will be shut completely, while major routes such as Bishopsgate and London Bridge will be bus-only. The Car Free Day isn’t a city-wide shutdown, it’s more of a gesture to raise awareness about London’s air quality issues and the city’s focus on sustainable transport.
“London's air pollution is killing us,” mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted earlier this year. More than 9,000 premature deaths are linked to London's dirty air each year – it's a certified health crisis. But that’s sometimes what it takes to get initiatives going.
Mexico City has had car restrictions in place since the late 1980s, when people reported seeing birds falling from the sky because of the pollution levels, just breathing the air was dangerous (a day’s worth of breathing was equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes). “Because of the crisis, some very brave and audacious policies were introduced,” says Gonzalo Peon, Mexico deputy director at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a US-based NGO focused on sustainable transport. One of those policies was Hoy No Circula (No-Drive Days), a programme that restricted car use across the city.
“The government basically said: ‘You can’t drive’,” says Kate Blumberg, Mexico country lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation. They weren’t thinking about new technologies or innovative manoeuvres, “it was just about getting cars off the road because there was an air quality crisis.”
For Mexico City, the car ban worked just enough to get the city out of crisis, carbon dioxide levels initially dropped by 11 per cent. So, in an attempt to make a bigger dent in the city’s air pollution issue, the government made the restrictions permanent. It sounds good on paper, but, as Blumberg says, “unless policies like this are very carefully designed, you have to be aware of unintended consequences.”
In the Hoy No Circula programme, each car is assigned one day a week when it cannot be used - but these restrictions are based on the license plate, not the driver. Once the extreme crisis was over, the system became unpopular. The public thought restrictions no longer seemed necessary, so they found a loop-hole: a second car. “They would just buy an old car so they could drive every day,” says Blumberg. “Then maybe their son or wife, someone who didn’t already have a car, would use that car too.”
It was a major step backwards. Peon says: “It incentivised people not to have a cleaner fleet, but an older, bigger fleet, so they could use a car all the time.”
Now Mexico City's system has evolved to include bi-annual maintenance and emissions checks. The cars deemed the cleanest are exempt from the plate restrictions, except for in emergency situations, turning the incentive to have two cars into an incentive to have one cleaner vehicle. This has made a difference, Mexico City’s air pollution has more than halved over the past 20 years, but that impact can’t be attributed solely to Hoy No Circula – car restrictions can’t solve air quality problems on their own.
Taking cars off the road temporarily provides an easy, short-term air quality boost, but it’s like putting a plaster on a gunshot wound - the bigger the plaster the better, but eventually you’re going to need more help. In Paris, for example, levels of nitrogen in the air dropped by 40 per cent four years ago when the city banned cars from the centre for one day. But that didn’t last long – less than six months later Paris was named the world’s most polluted city. Now, even though these no-car days happen once a month, the French capital still has a big smog problem.
It is possible, however, to turn car bans into a more lasting fix. Last year, Madrid banned all cars from its city centre permanently and fined anyone who broke the rule. Big change equals big result: according to activist group Ecologists in Action, nitrogen levels in the centre dropped by 48 per cent in six months because of the ban.
That kind of change is only possible if someone is willing to risk displeasing a few people get a comprehensive system in place. It’s easy to announce that people aren’t allowed to drive anymore, but for it to work, governments also need to improve public transport and set strict emissions standards and taxes. “We need strong leaders with a vision saying ‘this is where we are going’,” says Bernardo Baranda, Latin America director at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. “Cities are where a lot of innovation happens and I think we need more innovative leaders to really tackle these problems.”
That kind of attitude has proved effective in Oslo. Four years ago, when a green-labour coalition knocked the conservatives out of Oslo’s city council, the new government immediately started a push towards a car-free city centre.
“They’ve been very bold, very daring; they did what was considered radical,” says Øystein Berge, transport planning specialist at COWI a consultancy firm that specialises in engineering and environmental science. He explains how the city council removed car spaces, banned cars on some streets, brought in one-way systems to make it difficult to drive without going on a large detour and added tolls to city centre roads. The changes were so drastic, one conservative party politician compared the project to “a Berlin wall for motorists”.
These radical restrictions opened the city up to the often overlooked benefit of car restrictions: more space. While the environmental impacts provide a good motivation for bringing in a car ban, some of the greatest gains will be in urban development.
Oslo is a green haven, but that doesn't mean it isn’t dependent on cars - it just has loads of electric ones. “Some call the public transport lanes ‘Tesla lanes’ because there are more Teslas in them than busses,” says Berge. It’s great for the environment, he says, “but in terms of urban development, use of space and friendliness to pedestrians and bikes, electric cars are as bad as any other car.”
That’s why, for Oslo, keeping cars out of the centre is “more about space than climate”, says Terje Elvsaas, communications advisor for the Oslo Car Free City Programme. The city council has replaced parking spaces with extensive bike lanes, handicapped parking spaces to make the centre more inclusive, small parks, locations for pop-up shops and even mini-theatres. Other cities have more ideas about how to repurpose the space cars currently take up. The organisation behind London’s Car Free Day, for example, has found that if we scrapped all of London’s car parks the space could be converted into 80,000 homes.
“It’s important that we all think about what kind of city we want to live in,” says Hanna Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor for urban development. “We need to plan our cities better for the future so that the private car is not setting the premise for how we build our cities anymore.” Now, in Oslo, 10 per cent more pedestrians visit the city centre and recent polls show two-thirds of city residents are happy with the change.
Oslo’s process wasn’t faultless, however. “You could tell they were very eager to do something when they got into power four years ago,” says Berge. “It started off really really fast, many people would say it was too fast.”
Parking spaces were removed without much thought with what would replace them. “So they ended up putting chairs and a table and saying it was an outdoor office,” says Berge, unimpressed, “which you can’t use in Norway for nine months of the year.” These initial teething problems further incensed business owners, who were already terrified the car ban would prevent customers from coming in-store.
But that speed, though a little hasty, was essential, says Elvsaas. “Other cities can learn from the way we've done things,” he says. “Instead of waiting for these long-term political processes, we just did things quickly.” No other city has moved this fast to transform such a large area, he says, and the risk paid off as the coalition has just been reelected to serve another four-year term.
Elvsass hopes other cities will follow Oslo’s lead, but the government admits that they still have some hurdles to overcome. “Change is always difficult,” says Marcussen, and one of the biggest barriers is people’s mindsets. “To change the city centre will take time, maybe also longer than we thought when we came into office, but we have to start somewhere, and that is exactly what we are doing.”
So are car-free cities a feasible future? Berge thinks so. “Many people are still emotionally attached to their cars or see them as a symbol of freedom,” he says, but he sees that mentality shifting. “I think change is already here, we’re in the middle of it.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
