The city is already being given back to people

Say the words “car-free city” and someone will tell you it’s a fantasy. Cities can’t function without the private car. People won’t accept it. The numbers don’t work. I’ve heard all of these, and honestly, I get where they come from. Most people live in a place designed around cars, and it’s hard to imagine your own street working differently.

But the objection is strange, because the counter-evidence isn’t on a drawing board. It’s on the street. It has been for decades.

Pontevedra just… did it

Take Pontevedra, a city of about 83,000 in Galicia. In 1999 a new mayor took office and within a month the roughly 300,000 m² medieval centre was car-free. Street parking was removed, replaced by 1,686 free spaces in underground and peripheral car parks. ¹²

Not a pilot. Not a plan for 2040. They did it, and then kept it, for over 25 years. Since then: no fatal traffic casualties in the pedestrianised area. Only three across the whole city since 2007. A 66% fall in carbon emissions over the life of the programme. ¹²³ The same party has kept winning elections there. Whatever people feared would happen when the cars left, didn’t.

Barcelona is changing the rules of the whole game

Barcelona’s Superilles programme is a different scale. Not one centre, but the logic of an entire grid city. The Eixample plan alone calls for 21 green streets totalling 33 km, 21 new squares, 33.4 ha of reclaimed pedestrian space and 6.6 ha of new greenery. Those are targets, not yet fully achieved. But the first four green hubs and four squares came into force on 18 November 2022, adding 58,000 m² of pedestrian areas. ⁴⁵⁶

The clever bit: superblocks don’t ban cars. They restructure the street hierarchy so through-traffic stays on the perimeter and the interior belongs to people. I like that move a lot. You don’t have to fight about every street. Just change the network logic, and the network does the rest.

Utrecht treats cyclists like adults

The bicycle has a problem in dense cities: it’s clean, cheap and healthy, but it gets punished for existing. Rained on. Stolen. Crammed into railings like an afterthought. Utrecht’s answer: the Stationsplein bike parking, 12,500 spaces, the largest facility of its kind on the planet, open 24/7 with the first 24 hours free. ⁷⁸ Part of a network of about 22,000 spaces around the station. ⁸

This is the move I most want other cities to copy. Not guilt-tripping people out of cars, just making the clean option obviously better. You ride, you park under cover for free, you take the train. Simple. ⁹

Vauban is a neighbourhood where cars are the exception

Freiburg’s Vauban district was built from 1998 on a former French military base and houses about 5,000 people. Residential streets have no parking. Only households that don’t own a car are exempt from paying into the perimeter garage. In 2002, 40% of households owned no car, and walking and cycling made up 64% of all trips against 16% by private car. ¹⁰¹¹ Much of the housing was built by small cooperatives; the district runs on low-energy construction, solar PV and a wood-chip district heating plant. ¹⁰

I’m not going to oversell it. Vauban isn’t perfect, and that literal perimeter garage is a reminder that the car hasn’t gone away, just been pushed to the edge. But it’s three decades of evidence that a car-light life is livable, that people choose it, and that no one needed to be dragged into it kicking and screaming.

So what’s the hold-up?

Four different mechanisms, all operational. A small city that made the leap (Pontevedra). A megacity rewriting its street network (Barcelona). Infrastructure that makes the clean choice the easy choice (Utrecht). A new district built car-light from scratch (Vauban). If it were impossible, one of these would have failed by now. They didn’t.

The honest answer is that transition is hard, and every city starts from a different place. But “it can’t be done” stopped being an honest position the moment Pontevedra’s second decade ticked over. It has been done. The question is whether we’ll do more of it.

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Footnotes

1. The Guardian, “‘For me, this is paradise’: life in the Spanish city that banned cars” ↩ ↩²

2. ClimateXChange, case study: pedestrianisation and walkability in Pontevedra ↩ ↩²

3. The New York Times, “The Spanish City That Put Pedestrians First” ↩

4. Ajuntament de Barcelona, Superilles programme ↩

5. Ajuntament de Barcelona, Superilla de l’Eixample ↩

6. Info Barcelona, mobility changes in the four new green hubs, 18 Nov 2022 ↩

7. City of Utrecht, Bicycle parking Stationsplein: largest in the world ↩

8. Railway Gazette, Netherlands opens world’s largest bicycle parking at train station ↩ ↩²

9. City of Utrecht, press release on the Stationsplein opening ↩

10. GIZ/BMZ, Sustainable Urban Transport case study: Quartier Vauban ↩ ↩²

11. Metropolis, case study: sustainable urban district Vauban ↩