Though progress is often slow, city planners and politicians are gradually waking up to the fact that when cities offer safe and affordable alternatives to cars, we start to travel differently.
More and more young people are choosing bicycles, buses and trains over owning a car out of the sheer cost. In Berlin, it’s public transport, not cars, which is the coolest way of getting around.
In Copenhagen, a city that has a long held reputation for being bike-friendly, a whopping 62% of people choose to cycle their commute.
In the French city of Lyon, the number of cars entering the city has fallen by 20% compared to just a decade ago. As the city’s network of bike hire stations continues to grow, town planners are hoping for a further 20% decline.
In London, where cycle super-highways are becoming popular, the share of journeys made by car has fallen by a quarter since 1990.
Car free days are rising in popularity in many of the world’s largest cities, giving people a taste of what it’s like to live with less noise, traffic and pollution. Bogota was one of the first cities to introduce a car free day, and it’s now become so popular that it’s been extended to a full week.
Bogotá’s Ciclovía is fantastic! I was there in the mid-nineties and they closed a major artery, the Carretera Séptima, on Sundays. Here some pictures.
Isn’t it? In less car-centric places not having a car is entirely valid choice to make.
I could quite easily afford a car, but parking where I live is a nightmare and I can get get to 99 percent of my destinations either on my bicycle or if further away, by taking a train.
There’s some penalty in terms of convenience and traveltimes (especially out in the farmland, even though I can almost guarantee i’m faster on my bicycle than anything on four wheels within the city I live in), but that’s easily overshadowed by cost saving in my case by not having to buy and maintain a car and honestly also a gym membership which costs both money and the far more irreplaceable commodity of time.
Good for you. Not everybody can and not everybody lives in less car-centric places.
Yeah. That’s what I said? Why so heated?
You’d have to sweat a bit more to see me heated, sweetie.