Right of way

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 programmes. 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.

Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years,even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into walkers paradises, said Lee Schipper,a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specialises in sustainable transportation.

In the United States,there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving, said Peder Jensen,head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. Here there has been more movement to get cities relatively free of cars.

To that end,the municipal Traffic Planning Department in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town,causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the citys ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favour as they approach,forcing cars to halt.

Around Löwenplatz,one of Zurichs busiest squares,cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted,their speed is limited to a snails pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely,giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.

As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians,the citys chief traffic planner,Andy Fellmann,smiled. Driving is a stop-and-go experience, he said. Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians,not to make it easy for drivers.

While some American cities have made similar efforts,they are still the exception in the US. Europes cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the advent of cars,their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is generally better in Europe than in the United States,and gas often costs over $8 a gallon,contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United States,Schipper said.

What is more,European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.

Globally,emissions from transportation continue a relentless rise,with half of them coming from personal cars. Yet an important impulse behind Europes traffic reforms will be familiar to mayors in Los Angeles and Vienna alike: to make cities more inviting,with cleaner air and less traffic.

Michael Kodransky,global research manager at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York,which works with cities to reduce transport emissions,said that Europe was previously on the same trajectory as the United States,with more people wanting to own more cars. But in the past decade,there had been a conscious shift in thinking,and firm policy, he said. And it is having an effect.

After two decades of car ownership,Hans Von Matt,52,who works in the insurance industry,sold his vehicle and now gets around Zurich by tram or bicycle,using a car-sharing service for trips out of the city. Carless households have increased from 40 to 45 per cent in the last decade,and car owners use their vehicles less,city statistics show.

Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work. European cities also realised they could not meet increasingly strict World Health Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in nonattainment of their Clean Air Act requirements,but that fact is just accepted here, said Kodransky of the New York-based transportation institute.

It often takes extreme measures to get people out of their cars,and providing good public transportation is a crucial first step. One novel strategy in Europe is intentionally making it harder and more costly to park. Parking is everywhere in the United States,but its disappearing from the urban space in Europe, said Kodransky,whose recent report Europes Parking U-Turn surveys the shift.

Sihl City,a new Zurich mall,is three times the size of Brooklyns Atlantic Mall but has only half the number of parking spaces,and as a result,70 per cent of visitors get there by public transport,Kodransky said.

In Copenhagen,Jensen,at the European Environment Agency,said that his office building had more than 150 spaces for bicycles and only one for a car,to accommodate a disabled person.

While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership,American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number. New apartment complexes built along the light rail line in Denver devote their bottom eight floors to parking,making it too easy to get in the car rather than take advantage of rail transit,Kodransky said. While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has generated controversy in New York by pedestrianising a few areas like Times Square,many European cities have already closed vast areas to car traffic. Store owners in Zurich had worried that the closings would mean a drop in business,but that fear has proved unfounded,Fellmann said,because pedestrian traffic increased 30 to 40 per cent where cars were banned.

With politicians and most citizens still largely behind them,Zurichs planners continue their traffic-taming quest,shortening the green-light periods and lengthening the red with the goal that pedestrians wait no more than 20 seconds to cross. We would never synchronise green lights for cars with our philosophy, said Pio Marzolini,a city official. When Im in other cities,I feel like Im always waiting to cross a street. I cant get used to the idea that I am worth less than a car.