Without cars, the shops of downtown Pontevedra are thriving.
Without cars, the shops of downtown Pontevedra are thriving.
Removing the cars from the middle of a city doesn't guarantee you'll get a better city centre. You have to do it right.
Way back in 1999, the Spanish city of Pontevedra, in the northwest province of Galicia, closed a 30-hectare area to all but essential vehicles. "Essential" being emergency,service and delivery, and mobility. Thirty hectares is about the size of central Auckland, not counting Wynyard Quarter and the wharves.
Pontevedra is way smaller than Auckland, but the challenges it faced were much the same: pollution, congestion, downtown crime, a moribund economy and a lot of car crashes.
Excluding the cars wasn't their first idea. To start with, they wanted to "improve traffic conditions". But they couldn't work out how: making it "easier" to drive through town and find a park just meant more traffic and more of all the old problems.
Then Miguel Anxo Fernandez Lores was elected mayor. He believed that owning a car doesn't give anyone special rights to the street. His head of infrastructure, Cesar Mosquera, spelled it out. "How can it be," said Mosquera, "that the elderly or children aren't able to use the street because of cars? How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space?"
It's a different way of looking at the world.
Lores moved fast: the new rules were in place within three months of his election.
He wasn't horrible about it. "If someone wants to get married in the car-free zone," he said, "the bride and groom can come in a car, but everyone else walks. Same with funerals."
Now, all the old problems have been addressed. The city is growing, carbon emissions are down 70 per cent, the streets are far safer and the shops, bars and restaurants are thriving.
Pontevedra didn't just say no to cars downtown. Because they knew much of the congestion was caused by drivers looking for a place to park, they also removed all the surface car parks. And outside the city centre, they lowered the speed limit to 30km/h and replaced the traffic lights with roundabouts.
But perhaps the biggest lesson is that they didn't actually ban cars. They couldn't. Pontevedra is an unusual city, especially in Europe. Because it's small it has hardly any public transport. There's hardly any cycling and hardly anyone living in the city centre, either. To get around, people drive.
So when they stopped people driving into and through the centre, they still needed a way to encourage people to come into town. The answer: underground car parks on the periphery. In Pontevedra, you drive to town, park, and walk to where you want to go.
It's not perfect. In the peripheral streets where cars are permitted, there are still traffic jams. And they haven't improved the public transport or even provided shuttles from the car parks to the centre, although it takes only 20-30 minutes to walk across the car-free zone.
But transport is always a work in progress. People forget that.
Downtown Pontevedra, no longer home to cars.
Design for Living appears weekly in Canvas magazine.
