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Forget Low Traffic Neighborhoods, Planet Needs No Traffic Neighborhoods

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Let’s ban cars. Not just internal combustion-engined cars—that should happen within eight years anyway—but all of them. Sorry, Elon, even electric cars.

Too radical? OK, let’s keep some cars but instead dismantle all auto-centric roads installed since the 1920s. This isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Plenty of places have demolished flyovers and have not seen any increase in congestion. The poster child of the “freeway removal” movement is the transformation of an elevated highway in the Cheonggyecheon district of Seoul, South Korea, successfully turned into a linear urban park in 2006.

There are many other examples, such as the removal in 2014 of the Belgrave Road flyover in Leicester and the dismantling of San Francisco’s double-decked Embarcadero Freeway following the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.

Removing these roads didn’t result in any short- or long-term congestion. Predicted jams never materialized. Academics call this “traffic evaporation.” Just as building more roads leads to more use of those roads—induced demand has been well understood since 1866—removing them leads to a reduction in use.

Time to commission the demolition crews? Not so fast. Not all freeways need to be removed; many could be repurposed. For instance, in Auckland, New Zealand a freeway on-ramp was turned into the Te Ari I Whiti cycleway. It turns out induced demand works for many cycleways, too—soon after it was opened, the former freeway saw an explosion in use by cyclists, skateboarders, and others.

Prioritizing active travel led to an uptick in active travel: who knew?

In the U.K., the Tory government is aiming to boost walking and bicycling through financial and moral support for Low Traffic Neighborhoods.

While seemingly novel to many in the U.K. media, restrictions on the free passage of wheeled vehicles are old news: the Ancient Romans blocked highways to carriages, and on a side road leading to York’s Minster, one of England’s finest medieval cathedrals, there’s a sign telling pedestrians that they have been protected from carriages with traffic restraint measures for at least 600 years.

With such a long history, it’s perhaps surprising that there has been so much abuse in the mass media and on social media over the introduction on some roads of planters and number-plate cameras.

Many towns and cities already prevent through access to motorists on residential roads and have done so since the early 20th Century. The English “garden cities” of Letchworth, Hampstead, and Welwyn restricted wheeled vehicles from the get-go and, in the U.S., the garden city movement inspired the designers of Radburn in New York who, in 1928, promoted the community as a “town for the motor age,” yet which kept pedestrians and motor cars separated.

Car-lite streets came to be known as cul-de-sacs in the U.K. Motorists can access such streets, but not cut through them to elsewhere.

The existence of old cul-de-sacs or the building of new ones doesn’t lead to frothing headlines. That’s because we’re used to them. They’re normal. They’re also popular.

Low traffic neighborhoods are not no traffic neighborhoods; motorists can still access almost all areas but no longer via every single road in the locality.

Nevertheless, given the vocal opposition to such relatively tame schemes, it’s clear that the warnings from the latest IPCC climate report are not hitting home. To prevent climate breakdown, governments will, in all probability, eventually be forced to restrict motoring.

Think low traffic neighborhoods are radical? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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