The UK has built its way into a corner with regards to urban street infrastructure, as the motor car has become more and more affordable, our streets have been increasingly engineered to move vehicles rather than places for people.

However, it’s never too late to turn things around, in this series of posts I will look at quick and easy things local councils can do today to make their streets nicer places for people rather than machines.

Parking reform

The two great cycling cities in Europe are Amsterdam and Copenhagen, held up as bastions of safe and sane cycling, towns that have pushed motor vehicles to one side to make room for people to cycle. It is mostly forgotten how they got to this situation, how they managed to make room for people by gently making it harder and harder for cars to access the city while providing fast and easy alternatives.

In Amsterdam in the 1960’s, the city center was a car park. The now ubiquitous pedestrianised squares were turned into car parks and filled with vehicles. Copenhagen was grinding to a halt under the volume of traffic with on-street car parking rife.

But then both cities realised that they had a real problem on their hands, and rather than following the herd and trying to increase road capacity like other cities, they had the political will and vision to reduce private car usage within their city centers by removing on-street car parking and heavily pricing the remaining parking.

Heavily priced car parking and making the number of available spaces low, causes people to think twice about driving into the city and frees up space that was dedicated to the storage of metal boxes to be used as squares and plazas for people and social interaction. Alternatives the the car have to be provided, for example park and ride schemes or a local transit integrated into the wider public transport network. In Copenhagen, they constantly monitor the number of empty parking spaces and increase the parking cost so as to keep 10% of them empty, this way if you really need to park you can always find a space, but people are deterred from doing it everyday.

The removal of on-street parking frees up space on roads to re-allocate the space to human traffic, allowing for the creation of a segregated urban cycle network that allows people to complete the last 1-3 miles of their journey by bicycle.

This simple approach has the end result of reducing the amount of harmful motor traffic from our streets thus reducing noise, congestion, and pollution, while also providing space for subjectively safe cycleways and improved pedestrian facilities. And best of all, it’s cheap and easy to do, and can be done slowly over time (one street at a time, or a small increment in price at a time) giving time to improve public transport and cycling infrastructure.

Find out more:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/07/110713-cutting-down-on-city-parking/

http://www.reinventingparking.org/2011/01/european-cities-are-reaping-rewards-of.html