Good article in the weekend Globe about European cities becoming bike-friendly

In Europe, cycling caught on in a big way this year as COVID-19 discouraged cars and crowded public transit. Some cities' leaders hope to make the habit permanent and make congestion a thing of the past

Biking went mainstream virtually overnight, and cities such as Paris and Milan pushed the notion of “the 15-minute city,” where all of life’s necessities are within a 15-minute reach by foot or bike….

Pontevedra is a Galician city of about 83,000 on the Atlantic, just north of the Portuguese border. When Mr. Fernández Lores, now 66, was elected mayor in 1999, he inherited a pretty but ailing little metropolis. The historic centre was plugged with cars, and its narrow streets were filled with fumes and drug dealers. The street in front of his office saw 14,000 cars pass by a day. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, he said he found the centre “dead."

Within a month, he and his team swung into action. The entire historic centre was made a car-free pedestrian area. Surface parking spots were eliminated, opening up almost 1,700 spots for public use, and underground ones were built on the periphery. In the outer zones, they replaced traffic lights with roundabouts to ease traffic flow and end the gunning of engines at green lights, and brought speed limits down to 30 kilometres an hour. Footpaths, bike lanes and green space were added.

It wasn’t supposed to work, but it did. He got some pushback from motorists, who thought they had the right to park two tonnes of metal and rubber next to medieval buildings, but only some. Years before the pandemic persuaded other mayors to follow a similar route, Pontevedra was lauded as an urban renewal model and has won several international awards, including the UN-Habitat award in 2014. “Most children now walk to school alone, and the streets have become alive and filled with people,” the UN said.

The city claims zero traffic deaths since 2008, a 70-per-cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, 12,000 new inhabitants (no small achievement in a country whose towns are depopulating fast), a drop in crime and a 30-per-cent increase in business revenues….

Ms Hidalgo, 61, is a member of France’s Socialist Party and was first elected Paris mayor in 2014. She came in with a vision – a clever one. Instead of launching a war against cars and climate change per se, she went after air pollution, a quality-of-life issue that ensured broad buy-in. Who could be against breathable air?

By 2016, she had introduced “Paris Respire” days that eliminated cars from most areas of the centre on the first Sunday of each month and made public transportation free on those days. Later, she turned the busy highway that runs along the north side of the River Seine into a riverside park. “European cities, like Paris, were smart to focus on air pollution rather than climate change,” says Mr. Toderian. “Air pollution is real for people. You can see it, smell it. People liked what she did.”

Before the pandemic hit, Ms. Hidalgo ramped up her effort to reduce pollution, which meant getting Parisians out of cars and onto bikes and pedestrian walkways. She is creating 1,400 kilometres of bike lanes throughout Paris – almost every street will have a lane – and has removed thousands of surface parking spots. Her plan is to get rid of 60,000 of them, or about 70 per cent of the total. The major east-west artery, Rue de Rivoli, went car-free when Paris emerged from lockdown in May. From 2024, diesel cars will be banned

More than a few European cities are emulating, or hope to emulate, the Paris model. One is Milan, Italy’s commercial capital, which is also discouraging car use by handing over streets to cyclists and pedestrians. The Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, where a former mayor once used an armoured military vehicle to crush a car parked in a bike lane, is doing the same.

But it won’t work everywhere. Athens botched its “Great Walk” project, conceived only last year, to turn car-clogged streets in the centre into gracious, tree-lined pedestrian boulevards. The project was poorly designed, executed and marketed to the public. Edinburgh, one of northern Europe’s best-preserved old cities, is struggling to add bike lines and pedestrian-only streets.

Anthony Robson, an Edinburgh solicitor and bike-lane lobbyist, says Conservative factions and motorists are resisting the idea of adopting a strategy similar to Paris’s. “The Conservative councillors equated more cars with more shopping,” he says. “They said, ‘No cars, no commerce.' We’ve been trying to debunk this notion.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-bikes-pedestrians-and-the-15- minute-city-how-the-pandemic-is/