Car Free Living Lifrstyles in Near Future Cities

CAR FREE SMART CITY
The obsession with individual car ownership and the tendency to commute alone has created the traffic problem that everyone claims to hate. More than just a nuisance, traffic has taken from us our time and money, and has destroyed our environment and personal health.

With all those hours spent sitting in traffic jams, the American economy is hurting. A 2017 study conducted by transportation consulting firm, INRIX, found that traffic congestion cost the US economy $305 billion in 2017 alone. Beyond that, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), transportation is responsible for nearly 30 percent of greenhouse gases emitted in the US. These emissions create air pollution, which nine out of 10 of us breathe every single day and is responsible for the deaths of seven million people each year.

Cities across the world are slowly starting to ban cars altogether

While the list of cities experimenting with car bans is increasing, a few notable cases include:

Madrid – The city’s government officially banned all non-resident vehicles from its city center in November 2018. The only vehicles allowed will be those “that belong to residents who live there, zero emissions delivery vehicles, taxis, and public transit.” This ban came as part of the national government’s Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition which lays out broader plans to prohibit “all but zero emissions vehicles” from the city centers of all municipalities with a populations greater than 50,000 by 2025

Paris – Mayor Anne Hidalgo established rules stating that cars made prior to 1997 are banned from the city center on weekdays. She also laid out plans to make select streets available only to electric vehicles by 2020 and declared the city’s “urban core” care-free on the first Sunday of every month.

Oslo – The city has begun to scale back the availability of street parking spaces and has banned cars from several streets in its city center. Similarly, Amsterdam has announced a more ambitious plan to strategically eliminate 11,200 parking spaces by 2025.

These models and similar iterations have been tried in many other cities across the world and are beginning to prove successful. New York City saw increases in retail activity after establishing “pedestrian plazas” on some of the city’s busiest streets. Likewise, after Philadelphia eliminated some street parking, the city also saw a boost in sales for businesses where street parking was eliminated. Following Oslo’s city center car ban and reduction in street parking, the city saw a 10 percent jump in the number of pedestrians visiting the city center than the year prior.

While the idea of car-free living in cities seems promising, the concept has understandably been met with public backlash in many of the cities where these plans have been introduced. Nonetheless, the current state of traffic congestion is unsustainable and will only continue to hurt humans, the economy, and the environment if more is not done to eliminate it.