Excit­ed by the num­ber of cities that have closed off streets to cars dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, urban plan­ners are envi­sion­ing a dif­fer­ent city. Last week, Farhad Man­joo’s graph­ic New York Times fea­ture, “The End of Cars,” showed the nation how amaz­ing our streets could be with­out cars. At least a dozen cities have closed streets to make room for social­ly dis­tanced walk­ing and bik­ing. Oth­ers are extend­ing side­walks for al fres­co din­ing. Oak­land is the leader, with 74 miles of clo­sures, but New York is catch­ing up with plans to close off 100 miles of streets. Seat­tle is the first city to make its clo­sure of 20 miles of streets per­ma­nent.

Now that we have the vision, how do we achieve it once the pan­dem­ic is over? Mak­ing this tran­si­tion in U.S. cities, even at a small scale, will be excru­ci­at­ing, as near­ly all are built around the car. Seat­tle illus­trates that even in a lib­er­al city com­mit­ted to cli­mate action, depri­or­i­tiz­ing cars is painful and polit­i­cal­ly charged.

Dri­ving less means using oth­er modes of trans­porta­tion more—public tran­sit, bik­ing, and walk­ing. But options vary depend­ing on a city’s pop­u­la­tion, den­si­ty, degree of sprawl, and the extent of 20th cen­tu­ry rail removal. Many peo­ple in low-income neigh­bor­hoods have nei­ther cars nor ade­quate access to reli­able tran­sit, yet equi­ty objec­tives relat­ed to acces­si­bil­i­ty and afford­abil­i­ty of tran­sit are not often inte­grat­ed into trans­porta­tion plans in North Amer­i­can cities

In Green­o­va­tion, Urban Lead­er­ship on Cli­mate Change, I out­line five actions for depri­or­i­tiz­ing cars. I elab­o­rate on three of them below.

Create Car-Free Areas

Euro­pean cities lead. Venice, of course, has always been car free. Copen­hagen began cre­at­ing car-free zones in the 1960s. Freiburg, Ger­many banned cars in its his­toric cen­ter in 1973 and built exten­sive bike and trol­ley infra­struc­ture to replace cars. Brus­sels has one of Europe’s largest car-free areas, which city offi­cials are con­tin­u­al­ly expand­ing. Berlin, Ham­burg, Madrid, and Oslo are among the Euro­pean cities that have tak­en com­pre­hen­sive action to cre­ate car-free zones and add bike “superhighways”—physically sep­a­rat­ed, unin­ter­rupt­ed bike lanes that tra­verse a city. Berlin’s famous Unter den Lin­den began allow­ing only bus­es, taxis, and bikes in 2019. And in April 2019, Berlin sen­a­tor for envi­ron­ment, traf­fic, and cli­mate pro­tec­tion Regine Gün­ther announced that the entire area inside the S‑Bahn train ring to become car free by 2030, a con­tro­ver­sial under­tak­ing. Berlin plan­ners are pilot­ing clos­ing off streets and mon­i­tor­ing the effect on dif­fer­ent trans­porta­tion modes on these and sur­round­ing streets. Ham­burg’s approach is more com­pre­hen­sive, but slow­er: pedes­tri­an-only zones will be added grad­u­al­ly to include 40 per­cent of the city by 2035.

The strat­e­gy has been to cre­ate the bans, observe how they play out, and course cor­rect based on obser­va­tions. Poli­cies at the city and nation­al lev­el sup­port that process. Copen­hagen and Oslo are helped in reduc­ing cars by the fact that Den­mark impos­es a 180 per­cent tax on new car pur­chas­es and Nor­way 100 per­cent.

Although car-free zones are polit­i­cal­ly con­tro­ver­sial, Madrid shows that once the pub­lic expe­ri­ences car-free liv­ing, peo­ple don’t want to go back to car-choked cities. When a right-wing coali­tion that came to pow­er in May 2019 tried to elim­i­nate that car-free areas, pub­lic back­lash pres­sured them to relent. But Ger­many’s expe­ri­ence prob­a­bly more close­ly pre­dicts what will hap­pen in the Unit­ed States, as both coun­tries have strong car cul­tures. Gün­ther’s call for a car-free Berlin and elim­i­nat­ing cars with com­bus­tion engines even has oppo­si­tion from the Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (SPD), which is often in coali­tion with the Green Par­ty, because of its imprac­ti­cal time­line. Anoth­er fac­tor at play in Berlin that is sim­i­lar to many U.S. cities is that its mul­ti-nuclei urban form and grand-scale boule­vards and side­walks makes the need and desire for get­ting rid of cars less urgent, as Fer­gus O’Sul­li­van points out for Bloomberg City­Lab.

Provide Less Parking—and Make it Expensive

Too many cities have con­tra­dic­to­ry poli­cies. Lim­it­ing cars requires more pub­lic tran­sit. Cities that want to increase transit—the carrot—will not be effec­tive with­out the stick of reduc­ing the amount of park­ing and increas­ing its cost. Clos­ing off streets does reduce park­ing, but cities also have to exper­i­ment with reduc­ing or elim­i­nat­ing park­ing min­i­mums. These local laws require devel­op­ers to pro­vide a cer­tain amount of off-street park­ing, which varies for res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial areas. Among cities pur­su­ing this approach are Buf­fa­lo, Colum­bus, Lon­don, Mex­i­co City, Paris, Philadel­phia, San Fran­cis­co, Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and many more. UCLA urban plan­ning pro­fes­sor Don­ald Shoup, a lead­ing crit­ic of free and too-plen­ti­ful park­ing, has demon­strat­ed that min­i­mums pro­duce far more park­ing spaces than need­ed and make hous­ing more expen­sive.

Oth­er cities are reduc­ing the amount of free park­ing on offer. Zurich and Ham­burg have tak­en a com­pre­hen­sive and high­ly man­aged approach. In 1996, Zurich capped the num­ber of park­ing spaces and insti­tut­ed a cap-and-trade-type sys­tem that requires retir­ing old spaces to match any new spaces. These mea­sures to reduce park­ing reduce traf­fic and are less con­tro­ver­sial than con­ges­tion pric­ing, which charges vehi­cles for enter­ing areas of the city.

Implement (Better) Complete Streets Programs

Com­plete streets are an approach to design­ing and oper­at­ing streets that safe­ly accom­mo­dates pedes­tri­ans, bicy­clists, dri­vers, and tran­sit rid­ers of all ages and abil­i­ties. The move­ment got its start in 2004, and cur­rent­ly about 25 per­cent of Amer­i­can munic­i­pal­i­ties report the adop­tion of com­plete streets poli­cies. The prob­lem is the poli­cies are often ignored. Cities have to get bet­ter at liv­ing up to com­plete streets com­mit­ments. A study by Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to plan­ners Kel­ly Gregg and Paul Hess found that of 125 com­plete streets poli­cies, most are aspi­ra­tional and don’t grant clear legal author­i­ty for imple­men­ta­tion or pro­vide require­ments or process­es for bal­anc­ing the trade-offs among the dif­fer­ent uses that the streets are sup­posed to accom­mo­date. They con­clude that most poli­cies are weak and “do not cre­ate a sol­id foun­da­tion for trans­form­ing deeply insti­tu­tion­al­ized auto-ori­ent­ed street build­ing prac­tices.” Fur­ther, com­pre­hen­sive com­plete-streets poli­cies tend to be found in places that are white and wealthy, accord­ing to a 2017 report exam­in­ing poli­cies across the coun­try. Some evi­dence sug­gests that com­plete streets can lead to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, lead­ing to the Nation­al Com­plete Streets Coali­tion to include equi­ty and diver­si­ty into its eval­u­a­tion rubric and focus more on under­served com­mu­ni­ties.

The oth­er strate­gies are build­ing right-sized bus rapid tran­sit and imple­ment­ing (bet­ter) tran­sit-ori­ent­ed devel­op­ment. None of these are new—planners and oth­er urban­ists have been advo­cat­ing for these approach­es for years. As usu­al, what is miss­ing is polit­i­cal will. Per­haps this Covid-induced vision of cities with­out cars will cre­ate it.