SPEEDING TOWARD A CAR-FREE, POST-COVID FUTURE?

BY MARC HERMAN AND PAUL TULLIS

Barcelona, Spain is an awful place to drive.

The oldest parts of the city date to the year 15 A.D., and Roman horse carts were a lot narrower than your average Toyota. Newer parts were built in the second half of the 1800s and have a handful of wide avenues that are usually gridlocked, connected by about 4,500 neighborhood lanes that can seem suicidal to navigate. Traffic rules are treated as helpful, non-binding suggestions in Barcelona. It’s rare to find a traffic light obeyed here, to say nothing of parking rules. Swarms of motos, which are supercharged scooters — Vespas without the charm — turn every intersection into a starting line, the nervous moto-riders winding up their accelerators to a buzz like it’s midnight at LeMans, not 3:30 p.m. on any city block between an unmemorable clothing outlet and a great kebab stand.

Recently, with the world heating, the air worsening and a pandemic emptying the roads, Barcelona decided it was time to pull the trigger on radical plans to remove many, many cars from circulation downtown. Unsurprisingly, people who like driving freaked out. 

On October 4, hundreds of drivers in Barcelona staged a protest against one of the recent anti-driving initiatives, of which Barcelona has enacted several this year. At midday on a clear, fall Sunday, dozens of gleaming classic cars blocked a ring road in Montjuic, a large park on the city’s southern edge. The law had established a “low emissions zone” over most of Barcelona from Monday to Friday, banning older, dirtier cars from the city during the week.

Organizer-produced video of the October 4, 2020, protest.

The hobbyists had mounted protests every few months. Back in February, a similar flotilla of 3,000 vintage Beetles and Citroen 2CVs, goofy VW Vanagons with their camping roofs popped, and typical midlife-crisis two-seater whips had pulled out with a roar and slow rolled to a crosstown avenue, driving at glacial pace and honking their horns. Now they were back.

Old cars are, of course, cool, and local Montesa motorcycles particularly so. But by October, the protesters had failed to read the room. Echoing through the city’s dense downtown, the blaring horns and billowing tailpipes caused more pedestrians to cover their ears than to applaud. The demonstration would knot the city’s traffic for hours, creating precisely what the new law was trying to ameliorate: clogged streets, choking air and deafening noise.

Barcelona’s city government was unimpressed by the display and within weeks would announce a sweeping plan to restrict even newer cars from driving through much of the city, converting a third of downtown roads into pedestrian zones, bicycle routes and playgrounds.

Across Europe, dozens of cities are accelerating plans to reduce car traffic radically — removing parking spaces, lowering speed limits and even banning vehicles altogether from large swaths of commercial and business districts. The pandemic has been a factor in speeding up this long-in-the-making transformation. The decline in commuting due to work-at-home arrangements and the need to widen sidewalks to accommodate outdoor restaurant seating has helped European mayors pivot their climate agendas from Greta Thunberg-style doomsday messages to a radical re-orientation of urban life pitched as a post-traumatic lifestyle upgrade.

“Very little of a city is given over for free. Why should so many cars get so much?”

Policymakers continent-wide are starting to question whether cars and drivers have been getting too much of a free ride, for well-nigh a century. “Very little of a city is given over for free. Why should so many cars get so much?” asked Ria Hilhorst, cycling policy adviser in the Amsterdam Department of Traffic and Public Space as she surveyed a square in the city that had recently been redesigned in favor of pedestrians. Hilhorst was speaking for herself and not representing any municipality or group.

Opponents, though, have been caught off-guard by the speed of the changes and can sound panicky. “The idea of the city government of Barcelona, is the restriction of the private vehicle,” said Joan Blancafort, spokesperson for the Organization for Free Mobility, a Barcelona group that defends driving. “For a short distance, the bicycle is ideal. But not everyone is in condition to go by bike.”

Arguments like that — cars are too necessary to restrict, and people really like them — have so far failed to sway European city halls. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s government added 30 miles of bike lanes in short order last spring, part of a plan to decentralize commercial and residential zones into “15-minute cities,” where nearly all of one’s needs can be met within 15 minutes from home by foot, bike or public transit. Parisians overwhelmingly re-elected Hidalgo in June.

In Milan, Mayor Giuseppe Sala announced in April a plan to move virtually the entire city center toward pedestrian-only access. Birmingham, England wants to ban through-traffic downtown and reduce the speed limit to 20 mph across much of the city. Two hours north in York, officials expanded the number of streets and squares open only to foot traffic. Oslo, Norway has removed every single parking space in the city’s inner ring and enjoyed global publicity for lowering its death rate for pedestrians in 2019 to zero. Forty percent of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, will be car-free by 2035. The list goes on; even Stuttgart, home to automakers Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG, which together employ nearly a million, is establishing low-traffic zones.

That doesn’t mean the transition from cars in Europe is a fait accompli. It’s mostly forgotten that even cities already known today for pedestrian access and abundant bicycle culture were overwhelmingly car-centered just a few decades ago — and only changed on sometimes razor-thin votes of a city council. 

Amsterdam, which is famous as perhaps the most bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly big city on Earth, was traffic-plagued as recently as the 1970s, and got to where it is today not only through innovation in urban design, but thanks to hard-won political battles, astute coalition-building, and dogged defense of the policy ever since.

Now, political brawls Amsterdam fought in the Seventies are back on in Europe, and Barcelona is one of the new front lines. And, like Amsterdam, Barcelona’s war on the car is gaining notice in city halls around the world, including in the United States.

Barcelona. Streets in dark green are targeted for conversion as “green corridors” from which vehicle traffic will be restricted. Red squares indicate intersections to be converted to plazas.

Six months before the classic-car protest, a grand piano appeared in the middle of Aragó Street, Barcelona’s biggest crosstown boulevard. A downtown freeway in all but name — 350,000 cars, motorcycles and trucks cross Barcelona each weekday — the street had been closed for the day as part of a new city program called “Open Streets,” which shut down traffic on major through-routes on weekends. In place of the traffic, thousands of people filled Aragó to walk, play ping-pong, jog, picnic and listen to a piano concert.

Barely a week later, the Spanish government ordered one of the world’s strictest pandemic stay-at-home orders. With an estimated 45,000 dead across Spain between March and June, and the entire country under 24/7 quarantine, Spanish traffic stopped completely.

Almost immediately, sharp improvements in air quality and noise pollution showed up in the city’s data monitoring. Levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide, which had exceeded European Union-mandated limits for a decade, fell by half in the shutdown’s first two weeks.

“The quarantine radically changed the city’s environmental conditions,” said Xavi Matilla, chief architect for the City of Barcelona. Matilla’s office will run most of the projects to transform Barcelona’s streets. “We saw it was clean in just two weeks, and more than any concrete action, that generated a vision of the future.”

More recently, on December 1, Barcelona’s city hall released a revamped “mobility plan.” What should have been an innocuous pile of administrative process now read like an encyclical against the auto industry, a cornerstone of the local economy.

Spain is Europe’s second-largest producer of cars. The auto industry employs more than 600,000 people in a country that habitually hovers near the top of Europe’s unemployment charts. Closure of a Nissan plant near Barcelona earlier this year led to demonstrations and burning tires. In June, the Spanish government announced more than $4 billion in aid planned for the industry, which has been hammered by the Covid-era economic crash, and — since it accounts for 10 percent of Spanish GDP — is considered too big to fail.

Now, though, it seems Spain’s second-largest city has had enough of cars. The three-year mobility plan would reduce traffic sharply in the city, restrict driving near schools, expand an 18.6-mph speed limit virtually citywide and add 62 miles of new bike lanes. It promised a 25 percent drop in private car use by 2024, atop a 20 percent weekday drop already in evidence since 2019, thanks to the congestion-pricing scheme that spurred the October car protest.

Proliferating bike lanes and pedestrian zones don’t mean Barcelona’s car culture has screeched to a halt. Becoming Amsterdam is as much about mindset, which is trickier to change than a street sign. “We still think having a car is a right,” said Silvia Cassoran, director of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area’s bicycle transit program and an adviser to the city government on mobility. A key figure in establishing a low-traffic area, or superblock, in her beachfront Poble Nou neighborhood, Cassoran is a frequent target of motorists’ ire. She gets in a lot of Twitter fights.

Traffic still passes, but pedestrians and bikes are given priority in Barcelona’s Sant Antoni “superblock.” Photo by Marc Herman

For drivers, converting traffic lanes into pedestrian space can feel impinging on their freedom. “They see a space and they want it, because they feel it’s theirs and the public has appropriated it,” said Cassoran.

Joan Blancafort, the auto advocate, argued the complaints are more practical than emotional. “People in Barcelona don’t drive because they like to, they drive because it’s necessary. The car is a tool,” said Blancafort, adding that he walks to work himself.

If Barcelona’s new mobility plan comes to pass as written, within three years 80 percent of all trips in the city will be by public transit, on bicycles or walking. That’s comparable to the level of car-free trips inside Amsterdam’s belt freeway.

The government hopes to place trees in at least 20 formerly busy intersections, and divert whole avenues around newly installed playgrounds. The model for part of the plan, a superilla (superblock) in Sant Antoni, a neighborhood on the south side of the city, is full most days, with people meeting on outdoor benches and children playing in the street. In November, the nine-square-block promenade featured an outdoor, masked chess tournament taking place in what had been a busy intersection.

***

Understanding how Barcelona is changing so fast means accepting the uncomfortable truth that Covid and the before-and-after experience of Spain’s traumatic lockdown has made it politically easier to redraw Barcelona’s street map. Changes that seemed radical one year ago now seem like common sense in an era of social distancing. “Who is against having fewer cars pass in front of an elementary school?” asked Cassoran.

But local political fights from before the pandemic crisis will return and take place in an uncharted post-Covid landscape. In Barcelona, the biggest fights pre-pandemic were about spiraling rent and gentrification. Mobility has become part of that discussion, with the most visible car reduction plans so far targeted for expensive, hipper districts.

“It instantly raises the question of gentrification,” said James Connolly, co-director of the Barcelona Lab for Environmental Justice and Sustainability, a think tank that has advised the city on urban planning. Longtime residents worry, “’Who is this superilla for?’” he said. “’Is it for us? Because if it looks like Sant Antoni, it probably isn’t… it’s for the people you’re trying to bring in 10 years from now.’”

The worry is that “car-free” becomes a lifestyle brand, not a transportation policy.

“Leaning too heavily on the lifestyle argument is problematic,” said Connolly, “because the people who worried that the price of coffee is going to go up, and more importantly their rents will, are in many cases correct.” 

Xavi Matilla, the city architect, acknowledged that risk and cited a package of regulations designed to protect local businesses — essentially anti-Starbucks laws. Passed since 2015, the new regulations, he said, seek “to avoid substitutions” of older business with newer ones that can out-bid mom-and-pop stores on rent. Beyond the superblock program, extensions of bike lanes, lower speed limits and a broad list of widening sidewalks and narrowing streets cut across most city’s neighborhoods, he added.

The new superillas will also need to avoid pratfalls that afflicted the rollout of earlier initiatives in Barcelona’s slow-city redesign, where the city was widely accused of not consulting with neighbors before the work started. The successful project crosstown in Sant Antoni was preceded by deeper discussion with the nearby residents first. In several zones targeted for the next “pacification” plans, small business owners have voiced reservations.

Motorized traffic beside a new pedestrian zone on Barcelona’s Rocafort Street. Photo by Marc Herman

“When all this is a plaza, it will be stupendous, but they’ll finish Sagrada Familia first,” said Marc Villa, the young owner of the Santa Anita, a tiki bar with gallery windows and an outdoor terrace overlooking the heavily trafficked corner of Consell de Cent and Rocafort streets, slated to be converted into pedestrian space. (Sagrada Familia, architect’s Antonio Gaudi’s landmark Barcelona cathedral, has been under construction since 1882.)

Other local business owners worry that longstanding features of the city, like its distinctive diamond-shaped intersections, will be lost in the name of rolling back cars. “The diagonal shape of the street corners is one of the unique things Barcelona has,” said Enric Soler, who owns Soler Hardware, on Rocafort Street. “I think instead of changing them, they should focus on converting gas cars to electric.”

“The worry is that ‘car-free’ becomes a lifestyle brand, not a transportation policy.”

Making a sharp shift in urban planning seem like a high priority in the middle of a pressing public-health emergency and a steep economic crash is also a challenge. “More pedestrians passing will increase my clientele, of course,” said Vila, the young cafe owner. “But right now, they should invest in other things first. Like public health.”

Spanish public health systems are paid for by a mix of regional and national funds, while urban planning falls primarily to city governments.

Implementation of even smaller changes hasn’t always been smooth. One of the roads closed to driving on weekends last spring, a wide, leafy avenue called Passeig de Sant Joan had to reopen to traffic to avoid rerouting several key city bus lines. Another major road, Via Laietana, which runs from a heavily touristed area to the beach, also re-opened after local merchants and transportation drivers complained about access for deliveries. A plan to remove car lanes from Ronda de La Universitat, a notoriously busy, 1.2-mile route downtown, raised hackles with bicycle advocates, who noticed the redesign didn’t include a bike lane.

The next phase of Barcelona’s car plan is likely to focus on public schools. Matilla said that streets adjoining Barcelona elementary schools are to be among the first to be pacified in the next three years, narrowed and limited to 6 mph under the new mobility plan. Support for lowering speed limits in Barcelona increased after a 5-year-old boy was struck and killed by a motorcycle in 2019 in the Poble Nou neighborhood, site of the first superilla. The child had been walking near his school. Support for the mobility agenda’s speed restrictions rose after the incident, said Cassoran, who lives near the site of the accident. Limiting driving near schools is now a centerpiece of the broader program of street “pacification.”

This fall, with classes resuming amid Covid, parents’ groups at several elementary schools blocked roads in Barcelona with their kids, asking for streets near their schools to be included in the program. Students were encouraged to participate, and did. Amalia, 7, said she represented the second grade. “Cars go really nicely, but you have to keep in mind, there are so, so, so many now and they make a lot of noise and pollution,” she said. “‘Vrrrrrrrrrrr’!”

“Health First.” At Barcelona’s Auro Elementary School, students demand “pacification” of adjacent streets. The protests are either deeply cynical or profoundly cute, depending on how one thinks about 8-year-olds on a barricade. Photo by Marc Herman

***

At a bridge crossing a canal not far from the site of the original dam on the Amstel River that is the genesis of the city of Amsterdam, a cement traffic stanchion and a friendly man in a reflective vest diverting all cars greets drivers heading west on De Clercqstraat, one the main routes in and out of the city center.

The traffic cutoff is part of an experiment to determine whether car and truck traffic on the street can be reduced more than 70 percent by getting people to opt for another mode of transport — trams, bikes or commuter trains — on this route between the binnenstad and West, one of the more residential neighborhoods ringing it.

The tram operators want to save money by running fewer trips on the line through De Clercqstraat without slowing service. That would require each tram moving faster between stops. But to do that they’d need a car-free lane, which in turn means eliminating the bike lane and forcing cyclists to share space with cars. That’s not safe at the current rate of 13,000 cars and 22,000 bikes crossing the bridge each day, so the city is trying to get car traffic down to 4,000.

“Does it reduce traffic as much as needed, and where do they go?” asked transport consultant Marjolein de Lange, standing on a De Clerqstraat bridge one day in November. “What’s the influence on other routes? If you make overcrowding somewhere else, that’s not fixing the problem.”

The De Clerqstraat experiment is an illustration of how —in any city — transport modes need to accommodate one another, and that changes affecting one tend to cascade, changing all.

It’s also an illustration of how Amsterdam, which consistently ranks among the three most bike-friendly cities on earth (Amsterdammers fret about bias as the firm doing the rating is based in Copenhagen, their leading competitor), is still fighting battles that began 50 years ago to beat down the primacy of the automobile and win back space for cyclists and pedestrians.

Amsterdam’s flat terrain, compact layout (about half the square mileage of Portland, Oregon, with nearly double the population) and narrow streets seem naturally suited for modes of transport other than the automobile. Yet it wasn’t always so bike-friendly. Although bikes were so prevalent in the early part of the last century that many considered them the menace, for decades beginning after World War II, cars dominated city planning and official urban design discussions as the government started promoting them as a means of stimulating both the economy and the national spirit à la the American saviors who’d liberated the country. A 1966 plan envisioned canals converted into freeways and picturesque pleins into off-ramps.

“We thought the car is the future, so we should adapt the city to the car,” said Hilhorst, the city’s cycling policy adviser, “but that wasn’t what people wanted.” 

In Bike City Amsterdam, their account of the city’s war against cars, historian Fred Feddes and de Lange write about how the car was culturally linked to the postwar economic expansion. However, many Baby Boomers/hippies started to see cars as part of a morally bankrupt consumer culture. The bike symbolized freedom from consumerism as it embodied freedom of movement. With Dutch society’s educational attainment growing, more students started moving to the city to attend university, and it was cheap enough at the time for them. The small towns from whence they came had never fully succumbed to car culture and they brought their biking habits with them.

What they found when they arrived was a lot of this:

Eerst van der Helststraat in 1978. Photo courtesy of the Amsterdam Department of Traffic and Public Space

Streets clogged with vehicles and no dedicated bike lanes. Bike proponents organized into groups such as the Auto-Elimination Department and Car-Free Amsterdam. They began protesting, staging sit-ins in the middle of the street, and were immediately rewarded with success: Leidsestraat, one of the main shopping thoroughfares in the Centrum, was the site of a trial ban on cars two months after an April 1970 demonstration there; it was soon made permanent and remains in force to this day.

The movement might have stalled, however, had it not been for the intercession of other events, such as rising traffic deaths. In 1972, cars killed 457 children under 15 in the Netherlands, which had a population of about 13 million then. That would be comparable to 291 kids being killed by traffic in today’s New York City, where 215 people of all ages lost their lives to car accidents in 2019. Parents with perhaps little in common with hippies joined the cause and the protests took a dramatic turn: hundreds of people lying in the streets and pleins, beside their toppled bicycles, to simulate the tragedies.

The following year, an embargo by some members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries forced the Netherlands’ government to take immediate action to reduce the use of transport fuel; 10 consecutive “car-free Sundays” were declared, on which driving would be banned everywhere in the country. Many simply displaced their Sunday trips to other days, so its effect on gasoline consumption is debatable, but — like the stay-at-home orders of 2020 — they provided a window on what Amsterdam might look like with a radical reduction in the use of cars.

Car culture, nevertheless, motored on. City planners wanted to destroy a section of Amsterdam’s old city to run a four-lane road through in its place, which would be lined by skyscrapers, and extend the underground metro rail. The pro-bike forces aligned with historical preservationists, forming an odd alliance of young liberals and old conservatives.

“People were conscious of the need to work together,” said Hilhorst, who was active in the pro-cycling movement as a young woman in the 1970s. “That’s what made it so strong, I think.” (No such plan would get to the drawing board today, as the entire canal ring is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a protected conservation zone.)

The urban renewal plan targeted Nieuwmarktbuurt, and while its working-class residents found City Hall hard to fight, a monied group purchased de Pinto House, a building in the neighborhood dating to 1605, and refused to destroy or relocate it. That scuttled plans for the widened road. Though the metro proceeded through, necessitating the destruction of many old buildings and their small apartments, the narrow width of the street above was retained in order to keep de Pinto House; and low-slung buildings, much of it public housing, were constructed around it. Sint Anthoniesbreestraat is now one of the busiest cycling streets in the city. De Pinto house is a cultural center. Elsewhere in the city, Spui and Amstelveld, former parking lots, have been reclaimed as green or open space.

Sint Anthoniebreestraat in about 1900. De Pinto house is second from the right. Photo courtesy of Amsterdam Gemeente

Here’s what that same block shown above, on Eerste van der Helststraat in De Pijp, looks like today:

Eerst van der Helststraat in 2015. Photo courtesy of the Amsterdam Department of Traffic and Public Space

As the organizers of the early movement aged, some of them entered politics. As city aldermen, former activists such as Michael van der Vlis and Jan Schefer shredded plans for 15 parking garages in the canal ring and began zoning the city for high density, whereby people need only to traverse short distances to get to work, school, and run errands — a forerunner of the 15-minute city now planned for Paris, London and elsewhere. Volunteers fanned out across the city noting bottlenecks for bikers and designing alternate schemes.

The designs that emerged from this process are among Amsterdam’s most significant and enduring contributions to the feasibility of bike-first urban planning, many of which have brought ancillary benefits no one expected. Waist-high posts were placed at roughly 6-foot intervals along many streets to prevent cars from parking on the sidewalks, a practice that not only confounded bikers but also blocked emergency vehicles. (The bollards are not pretty, but they do the job, and sidewalk parking is so not a thing now, even in places where the posts were never placed, that many have recently been removed.)

A ban on parking at street corners to help bikers see cross-traffic greatly reduced available spots and widened the sidewalks at the corners so much that these are now gathering places for neighbors. And parents in Barcelona may find, as Amsterdam’s have, that traffic cutoffs in front of primary schools encourage them to stand around the street and chat before pick-up and after drop-off. Reducing traffic, it turns out, fosters community.

It also makes room for other, more important traffic.

“If you make it more difficult to drive, it increases flow for vehicles that actually need to be there, such as delivery vans and emergency vehicles,” said transport consultant Marjolein de Lange. And as producers’ and suppliers’ transport costs fall due to reduced time in traffic, they pass on the savings to their retail customers, driving down the cost of living. 

Shopkeepers were similarly convinced in Pontevedra, Spain, where cars are largely banned from the entire city center: Initial polls showed 75 percent of residents opposed a car ban. Once they’d had a chance to experience the effects, 75 percent favored expanding it.

***

It’s not like America, the bedrock of car culture, is unable to think outside of the automobile.

In October 1989, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area, killing 56 and damaging or destroying thousands of structures. Among them was the Embarcadero Freeway, a two-level, 3-mile concrete monstrosity that for 32 years had cut off the city from its waterfront, including the magnificent Ferry Building, one of the only structures to survive the 1906 earthquake. The upside, supposedly, was that the freeway gave drivers and goods a slightly faster route — when it wasn’t clogged with traffic — between the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. But when the freeway suddenly needed millions in repairs, the city’s mayor and county Board of Supervisors didn’t squander the opportunity to get rid of it, and it was torn down in 1991.

Today the Embarcadero’s wide footpaths and bike lanes are crowded with walkers, strollers, runners, and bikers. Trams and cars run down the middle. The Ferry Building hosts shops, restaurants, and a farmer’s market. The earthquake also spurred ferry service when the Bay Bridge closed for a month during repairs. There are now 17 ferry routes serving commuters where there had been just one before the earthquake.

The possibility that U.S. cities will seize the moment to remake their transport infrastructure in the wake of the pandemic seems remote. So far, as in many other categories of public policy concerning health, environmental protection, or equity, the United States lags behind Europe. By at least one measure, the disparity is almost unbelievable: The United States has just 471 miles of protected bike lanes in the entire country, according to an inventory compiled by People for Bikes, a Boulder, Colo.-based advocacy group. The World Resources Institute counted 23,000 miles in the Netherlands, which is half the size of South Carolina.

The notion of pedestrian-friendly streets is not entirely foreign to the United States. At least 20 cities have adopted Vision Zero, an international road-safety standard that designs streets to be safer for more varied forms of transport, typically at the expense of automobile drivers’ convenience. While a few transformations of public spaces such as New York City’s Times Square have garnered most of the attention, changes as a result of Vision Zero have been much more pervasive. But they tend to redesign one area of a city, rather than rethink transportation throughout. Pedestrian malls exist in Denver, Santa Monica, Calif., Charlottesville, Virginia, and elsewhere, but these are novelty destinations (that can only succeed with the provision of ample parking), not threads of a broad fabric.

“It’s not like America, the bedrock of car culture, is unable to think outside of the automobile.”

Of course, just as in Europe, levels of traffic have fallen dramatically during the pandemic, creating “a really compelling opportunity to re-designate uses from cars to pedestrians,” said Uwe Brandes, director of the Global Cities Initiative at Georgetown University. Yet despite the chance “to take advantage of this time to do some more experimentation,” Brandes continued, “I just don’t see the level of scale, appetite, and determination” as exists in Europe.

Hilhorst and de Lange offered advice for American planners and advocates: Start small, with pilot projects. Lower speed limits so people feel more comfortable biking. Make side streets one-way for cars and two-way for bikes, so bikers can find a quiet route even in the absence of dedicated lanes. Charge up the wazoo for parking — it costs €7 ($8.50) per hour to park in central Amsterdam, and everywhere else inside the freeway ring requires expensive permits that are in short supply. Seek opportunities. “If you have a few good examples, it makes bigger changes more attractive,” de Lange said.

This is basically what’s known as “tactical urbanism”: temporary bike lanes, parklets, “bump-outs” that narrow the street at intersections, forcing traffic to slow. Brandes said that street festivals that close blocks to traffic and car-free days can generate support. “It creates a shift in consciousness about the value streets represent to people,” he said. And as new neighborhoods get built or re-developed, they can be designed pedestrian-first, as Amsterdam and Freiburg, Germany, have demonstrated and as Barcelona, which has also employed tactical urbanism widely, is finding now.

Of course, such changes don’t necessarily improve lifestyles equally. Though not the only factor, urban redesigns have squeezed low- and middle-income Amsterdammers. After cars were kicked out, once-working-class areas like De Pijp and Jordaan have been overrun by young men in smart haircuts and $100 trainers, and fin-tech bankers from London and New York. Cars can still use 60 percent of the space not occupied by buildings in Amsterdam’s historic center for driving and parking. Still, automobile traffic is falling and bicycle traffic rising — even zones further from downtown have been seeing more bikes and fewer cars.

***

Two months after the classic cars revved through the city, Christmas season arrived in Barcelona. Facing a new wave of Covid-19, the government pleaded with its citizens to stay home for the holidays, but few did, because at Christmas in Spain, you travel. Barcelona’s roads were thick with traffic on the weekends before the holiday as people rushed to towns outside the city to see grandparents, sisters, and friends, start decorating and shopping, or hit the slopes before family took over their lives — and stayed off the trains if they could, fearful of Covid.

Photo by Marc Herman

With the pandemic also having emptied the city of tourists and everyone else back home with grandma in the poble, Barcelona’s neighborhoods took on a rare quiet for the people who’d stayed behind.

In one neighborhood, near the train station, a four-lane avenue had been closed to cars, part of the Open Streets plan. Around 7 on a chilly evening, it started filling with people. Movie theaters still felt infectious and restaurant seating had cut back to half, so the only thing to do was go out in the middle of the closed street and promenade with the neighbors. So everyone did. Like their great-grandparents had in 1900, residents spent hours strolling the city, up and down, window shopping and bumping into friends, who’d inevitably ask about their family and compliment their masks.

Overhead, the Christmas decorations were up and you could stand right in the middle of a four-lane street and look at them lit up in a row. Below, three kids and an off-leash greyhound were chasing each other around the avenue’s fast lane, where nothing hit them.

____________________

Marc Herman is a writer living in Barcelona. @marc_herman_.

Paul Tullis has written features on the environment, medical science, criminal justice and more for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Scientific American and others. He lives in Amsterdam.

This article was originally published by Red Canary Magazine.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.