Europe: The hunting of car drivers is a city policy

ZURICH ― While American cities synchronize traffic lights for what is called a "green wave" to accelerate the flow of cars, many European cities, aided by apps aiming to help drivers find parking, are doing the exact opposite: creating an environment openly hostile to car drivers.
The methods vary, but the objective is clear ― to make car usage expensive and sufficiently annoying so that drivers turn to less harmful modes of transport. Cities like Vienna, Munich, and Copenhagen have closed huge areas of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have allowed lanes for cars to be disrupted by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty tolls in the city center. Over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of "eco-zones", where only cars with low CO2 emissions are allowed to enter.

Similarly minded cities also welcome new shopping centers and apartment buildings but strictly limit the allowed number of parking spaces, meaning they do not set a minimum number of parking spots but rather a maximum. Street parking is disappearing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into "pedestrian paradises", says Lee Schipper, a research leader at Stanford University specializing in sustainable transportation. "In the USA, cities are adapting to car traffic” says Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here (in Europe), we want to make cities livable for people again, not for cars.”

To this end, the Zurich Department of Transportation Planning has been striving hard in recent years to annoy car drivers. Red lights have been added along the roads into the city, placed at short intervals, which increases delays for commuting cars. Pedestrian underpasses, designed to not hinder the flow of cars across main routes, have been removed, and people cross naturally where they need to. Drivers of the ever-expanding tram network can switch the traffic lights they approach to green, forcing cars to stop. Around one of the busiest squares in Zurich, Löwenplatz, cars are now banned from entering for many blocks. In places they are allowed, they are limited to snail speed, allowing the complete removal of crosswalks and associated signs, so pedestrians have the freedom to move according to their natural needs again.

When chief city traffic planner Andy Fellman watched a couple of cars inching through a mass of bikes and pedestrians, he smiled. “Driving requires constant stopping and starting,” he said. “That’s how we like it! Our goal is not to make it easier for car drivers here, but to reclaim public space for pedestrians, because only in this way can you draw people back into the city. This obviously has its economic benefits; merchants earn more, and the city makes more in taxes and fees.”

Although some American cities ― especially San Francisco, which has adapted parts of Market Street for pedestrians ― exhibit similar efforts, they remain exceptions in the USA. “Deeply rooted notions of convenience and entitlement currently make it largely impossible to get people out of cars,” said Dr. Schipper. “European cities generally have stronger motivation to act. For the most part, they were built before the advent of the automobile, and their narrow streets can poorly handle dense traffic. Public transportation in Europe is generally better than in the USA, and gasoline often costs over $8 per gallon (3.785 liters), contributing to up to three times higher costs per kilometer of driving compared to the USA.” added Dr. Schipper.

Moreover, EU countries would likely not meet their commitments under the Kyoto Protocol regarding the reduction of CO2 emissions if they did not limit car traffic. The United States has not ratified this treaty.
The amount of emissions from transport is still rising globally, with half coming from passenger vehicle operations. However, an important impetus for European transport reforms is familiar to mayors in both Los Angeles and Vienna: to make cities more attractive, safer, and cleaner, with less unnecessary car traffic.

Michael Kodransky, head of global research at the Institute for Transportation and Development Strategy in New York, which works with cities to reduce emissions from transport, claims that Europe was once “on the same wavelength as the United States. People wanted to own more and more cars.” However, in the last decade, a "conscious shift in thinking" has occurred, he said. And it is working. Even though Hans Von Matt (52), who has worked in insurance and owned a car for twenty years, has now sold his vehicle and travels around Zurich by tram or bike and uses car-sharing for trips outside the city. As city statistics show, the number of households without a car has increased from 40 to 45 percent over the last decade, and car owners use their vehicles less.
“There was a lot of fighting over whether this road should be closed or not ― but now it’s closed, and people have quickly gotten used to it,” he said as he stepped off his bike at Limmatquai – now a pedestrian promenade lined with cafés, once a two-lane road deemed essential in the city’s traffic system. Transforming every major road back into a street, meaning closing it to cars, must be approved in a referendum.
Today, 91 percent of Swiss parliament representatives commute by tram. 
Still, there are grumbles. “There are so many zones where you’re only allowed to drive 20 to 30 kilometers per hour, which is quite stressful,” said councilman Thomas Rickli as he parked his Jaguar in a lot on the outskirts of the city. “It’s pointless,” he added.
Urban planners, the people responsible for the city’s development planning, generally agree that the increase in the number of people using cars for everyday transportation is not in the interest of any city.
Andy Fellmann calculated that a person driving a car uses 115 cubic meters of urban space in Zurich, while a pedestrian uses three. “It’s an economic absurdity, and it hasn’t been justified anywhere. Space in the city is simply too valuable to be taken up by cars. If you use a car, it’s unfair to others; you simply spread out disproportionately, and it costs everyone a lot of money,” he said.

European cities have realized that they cannot fulfill increasingly strict directives from the World Health Organization regarding air pollution from fine particles if cars continue to dominate. Many American cities also do not meet air quality requirements, but this reality “is simply tolerated here,” said Michael Kodransky from the New York transportation institute.

Getting people out of cars often requires extreme measures, and a key first step is providing good public transport. One of the new strategies in Europe is to deliberately make parking more difficult and expensive.
“In the USA, parking lots are everywhere, but they are disappearing from urban space in Europe,” said Michael Kodransky, whose recent report “The Turnaround in European Parking” addresses this shift.

Sihl City, a new shopping center in Zurich, is three times larger than the Atlantic Mall in Brooklyn, but it has only half the parking spaces, and as a result, 70 percent of visitors use public transport to get there, Michael Kodransky said.

Peder Jensen from the European Environment Agency said that his office building in Copenhagen has over 150 bicycle spaces and only one for a car, which serves an employee with a disability.
While many European building codes limit the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American laws often set a minimum number instead.

New residential complexes built along the tramline in American Denver sacrificed the lower eight floors of parking, making it “too easy” to get into a car instead of using tram transport, said Michael Kodransky.

While Mayor Bloomberg stirred up controversy in New York by transforming a few small areas in Manhattan (such as Times Square or parts of famous Broadway) into pedestrian spaces, many European cities have already closed off huge areas to car traffic. Shop owners in Zurich feared that these closures would lead to a drop in revenue, but this concern proved unfounded, said Andy Fellmann.
After the car ban, foot traffic in these streets increased by 30 to 40 percent. Zurich's planners, backed by most politicians and citizens, continue to tame car traffic and shorten the intervals of “green” for cars while extending the red so that pedestrians do not have to wait longer than 20 seconds at the crosswalk, not cars. “With our philosophy, we would never synchronize green lights for cars,” said city representative Pio Marzolini. “When I’m in other cities, it feels like I have to keep waiting to cross the street. I can no longer get used to the idea that I should have less value as a pedestrian than a person sitting in a car.”

Article by Elisabeth Rosenthal for The New York Times translated by Martin Bednarski and Jan Jokl.