Eideard

A quarter of households in Britain – more in the larger cities, and a majority in some inner cities – live without a car. Imagine how quality of life would improve for cyclists and everyone else if traffic were removed from areas where people could practically choose to live without cars. Does this sound unrealistic, utopian? Did you know many European cities are already doing it?

Vauban in Germany is one of the largest car-free neighbourhoods in Europe, home to more than 5,000 people. If you live in the district, you are required to confirm once a year that you do not own a car – or, if you do own one, you must buy a space in a multi-storey car park on the edge of the district. One space was initially provided for every two households, but car ownership has fallen over time, and many of these spaces are now empty…

Car-free areas of this kind, with anything from a couple of hundred to more than a thousand residents, exist in Amsterdam, Vienna, Cologne, Hamburg and Nuremberg, among others. There is even a small one in Edinburgh.

There is another form of car-free development, so familiar we have until recently overlooked its potential. Most pedestrianised city or neighbourhood centres in Britain are almost entirely commercial. But a few farsighted councils, such as Exeter, have brought back housing and residents, without cars or allocated parking, into city centres that would otherwise be deserted after 6pm.

Groningen, the Netherlands’ capital of cycling, has the largest car-free centre in Europe: half-pedestrianised, entirely closed to through traffic, with 16,500 residents, three-quarters of whom have no car in the household. Forty percent of all journeys within the city are made by bicycle.

It all makes great sense – and worth special consideration as nations, provinces and cities move forward with plans to reduce energy consumption, rebuild the broadest possible use of urban space.

Here in the States, we’ll have to figure how to attach a gentrification tag to it. Get the upper-middle-class to think of this as somehow bestowing an aura of upward mobility. It still is difficult to sell urban benefits to a population that finds less expensive living in suburban and/or rural areas.