While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by
popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of
“environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter. Like-minded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of Market Street — have
made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched.
Read on in NYT.
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