340 European Cities Restrict Usage of Cars

Cities in Europe "are dramatically scaling back their relationship with the car," reports the Washington Post: They are removing parking spaces and creating dedicated bike lanes. They are installing cameras at the perimeter of urban centers and either charging the most-polluting vehicles or preventing them from entering. Some are going so far as to put entire neighborhoods off-limits to vehicles. In Norway, Oslo promotes "car-free livability." Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo touts the "end of car dependence." And while those ideas might sound radical to car-loving Americans, they are fast becoming the norm across the Atlantic, where 340 European cities and towns — home to more than 150 million people — have implemented some kind of restrictions on personal car usage... [V]irtually every major European city is imposing some kind of rule. Milan has a system similar to New York's, charging for access to the city core — while entirely banning older, highly polluting vehicles. London charges vehicles that don't meet emissions standards, in what it calls the "largest clean-air zone in the world." The programs are not just the purview of liberal Western Europe: Warsaw, Poland, and Sofia, Bulgaria, recently adopted similar schemes. Even little Italian villages have added vehicle restrictions to reinforce their historic feel. And the Netherlands just broke ground on a 12,000-person neighborhood that will be entirely car-free. The neighborhood, known as Merwede, will be connected by public transport to Utrecht, a medium-size city that — perhaps no surprise — has a low-emissions zone of its own... Perhaps the most elaborate and transformative effort has come in Paris, where Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor in 2014. Since then, Paris has banned the most-polluting vehicles from the city, eliminated 50,000 parking spaces and added hundreds of miles of bike lanes. It turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone, and closed off the famed Rue de Rivoli to traffic... Journeys by car in Paris have dropped by about 45 percent since 1990. The city has now become a source for striking before-and-after photos: of clogged streets that have transitioned into tree-lined areas where people can walk and play. In London government officials say inhalable particular matter has fallen, according to the article, while combustion-produced nitrogen dioxide "is 53% lower than it would have been without the restrictions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mar 15, 2025 - 22:53

340 European Cities Restrict Usage of Cars

Cities in Europe "are dramatically scaling back their relationship with the car," reports the Washington Post: They are removing parking spaces and creating dedicated bike lanes. They are installing cameras at the perimeter of urban centers and either charging the most-polluting vehicles or preventing them from entering. Some are going so far as to put entire neighborhoods off-limits to vehicles. In Norway, Oslo promotes "car-free livability." Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo touts the "end of car dependence." And while those ideas might sound radical to car-loving Americans, they are fast becoming the norm across the Atlantic, where 340 European cities and towns — home to more than 150 million people — have implemented some kind of restrictions on personal car usage... [V]irtually every major European city is imposing some kind of rule. Milan has a system similar to New York's, charging for access to the city core — while entirely banning older, highly polluting vehicles. London charges vehicles that don't meet emissions standards, in what it calls the "largest clean-air zone in the world." The programs are not just the purview of liberal Western Europe: Warsaw, Poland, and Sofia, Bulgaria, recently adopted similar schemes. Even little Italian villages have added vehicle restrictions to reinforce their historic feel. And the Netherlands just broke ground on a 12,000-person neighborhood that will be entirely car-free. The neighborhood, known as Merwede, will be connected by public transport to Utrecht, a medium-size city that — perhaps no surprise — has a low-emissions zone of its own... Perhaps the most elaborate and transformative effort has come in Paris, where Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor in 2014. Since then, Paris has banned the most-polluting vehicles from the city, eliminated 50,000 parking spaces and added hundreds of miles of bike lanes. It turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone, and closed off the famed Rue de Rivoli to traffic... Journeys by car in Paris have dropped by about 45 percent since 1990. The city has now become a source for striking before-and-after photos: of clogged streets that have transitioned into tree-lined areas where people can walk and play. In London government officials say inhalable particular matter has fallen, according to the article, while combustion-produced nitrogen dioxide "is 53% lower than it would have been without the restrictions."

340 European Cities Restrict Usage of Cars

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