ATL Urbanist

European cities resist car-dependency

Pardon me as I drool after reading today’s New York Times article on European efforts to make cities easier to walk/bike in and more difficult for personal cars. The focus is on Zurich where cycling and use of public transit are more convenient than driving.

A quote:

As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s [Zurich] chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.”

What are European cities hoping to gain from these efforts? Here’s a short list:

• Lower carbon emissions
• Increased safety and convenience in the pedestrian experience
• More efficient use of space (“a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three”)

I certainly would never expect Atlanta to be as pedestrian oriented as an old European city like Zurich that grew and matured prior to the automobile. But I do hope this idea of re-building cities to accommodate people more so than cars catches on here. Surely there’s a middle ground between our current car-topia and Zurich’s pedestrianization (is that a real word or did I just make that up?) that a city like Atlanta could embrace.

Read the full article here and be sure to visit the slideshow to see what a city can look like when it isn’t riddled with highway-access ramps, surface parking and garages.

Photo: Christoph Bangert for The New York Times