Cars and cities

Victims of their popularity, most large cities such as Tokyo, Bombay and Shanghai are regularly plagued by traffic jams, due to their teeming populations and the continual flow of new arrivals. Confronted by congested traffic and with public opinion increasingly sensitive to green issues, big cities are trying a number of sometimes quite original solutions, to improve the flow of traffic. Unfortunately, not all these measures have a significant, or even positive impact. To cite just a few examples: setting up toll gates around London has indeed reduced traffic by 15%, but closing the centre of Rome to cars has triggered a substantial increase in motorbikes and motorcycles. As for Athens, the introduction of alternative traffic management has its downside, with modest families resorting to purchase a second older and more polluting car.

The offending automobile is the object of very different measures from Seoul to Mexico, with Moscow in between. If historic cities like Paris were not built to accommodate the automobile, more recent metropolises like New York have planned their growth around cars, with a major network of large highways. Today, no success story stands out as a universal model and cities continue to seek a middle way between the two extremes: Venice, the city without cars, and Los Angeles, the city without pedestrians.

Urban sprawl is often both the cause and the result of escalating traffic in cities. Sprawling cities do not encourage the development of an efficient public transportation network, and make people dependent on their cars. Sacramento, California, has implemented a compact city plan as a rampart against exploding city limits. By building more densely, the city has been able to reduce car use by 11%. Other ideas were considered as an alternative to the car, such as denser public transportation networks or installing urban tolls like London or Milan. These measures are dissuasive, but many journeys cannot be made without a car. It is thus necessary to adapt the car to the city, rather than banish it altogether from the urban scene.

Most cities adhere to this idea and are reflecting on how to integrate the car more harmoniously into the city. Some are taking political initiatives, to incite carmakers to improve their vehicles. In France, for example, the “éco-pastille” badge taxes buyers of polluting vehicles, thus rewarding the purchasers of clean vehicles. In this way, the car benefits from the ongoing technological advances made by the industry, which is already making real efforts in terms of research and development to offer safer, cleaner cars. With major focus on new low-emission fuels and energy efficiency, they are developing technologies that are adapted to cities. A good example is Valeo’s StARS system designed to suppress all CO2 emissions when the car comes to a halt, by automatically cutting off the motor.

Across all frontiers, the automobile is a headache for most major cities worldwide from Jakarta to Buenos Aires. City planners, politicians, automotive industrialists, and architects are key players in this debate. Their reflections and ideas will prove fundamental to reconciling cars to the city. At the heart of the debate, the major stakeholders in the ongoing evolutions are the end users, whether they are drivers, passengers, and owners of their own cars or not. Increasingly aware of the issues at stake, they are changing the way they move and the way they buy cars.