Cities for people… or cars?

Imagine that you were a car, not a person. How different would life be for you in Dhaka? Your housing would be assured. You would be given priority outdoors, able to move around and idle where you choose. If you happened to run someone over, there would likely be no punishment for you or your driver; it would be framed as an "unfortunate accident." Rather than suffering from traffic and pollution, you would be helping to cause it.

This might seem a ridiculous proposition, but when we take a step back and look at how we organise our cities, the question does reasonably arise: are we designing urban space for people or for cars? Cars get affordable housing, which is in short supply for human beings. Cars are sold in car haats organised on playgrounds, and parked there as well, while there are not nearly enough such fields for people. Cars sleep comfortably in parking lots; if children try to play near them, they are warned away due to fear of damage to the vehicles. We complain about congestion and pollution, yet continue to welcome ever-increasing numbers of cars on our streets. We mourn those killed on the roads, yet seem unable to understand that a vehicle weighing a tonne or more, when travelling over 30 kilometres an hour, will occasionally cause fatalities, regardless of what we do to prevent them.

Every year on September 22, cities around the world celebrate World Car Free Day. In Europe, they celebrate European Mobility Week from September 16 to September 22. It is a good opportunity to reflect on life in our cities and how we can improve it. As an optimist, I am convinced we could do much better—if we ever decided to value people more than cars, and to understand just how much we give up for the sake of our cars.

I have given a TEDx talk on this topic, where I mention a few examples of what we sacrifice for the sake of our cars: time spent earning money to buy cars, then wasted in congestion caused by our cars; children robbed of their childhood, unable to walk or cycle to school or to play outdoors; the more than one million people killed each year in road crashes (and tens of millions more injured), the trillions of dollars of subsidies to fossil fuels—when we should be weaning ourselves off of them instead of subsidising them.

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I also talk about some of the positive global trends, such as the cities that are reining in cars in different ways. This includes regular car-free events, the biggest being Bogotá's Ciclovía, which liberates 120 km of roads from cars for several hours each Sunday and holiday; cities that actually reward rather than punish those on foot and bicycle; and the many European cities that have made much of their downtowns free of motorised vehicles. Barcelona's superblocks, which greatly restrict car use and convert intersections into plazas, are a hot topic of conversation for those wishing to create urban areas that are quieter, cooler, and less polluted.

Admittedly, the more time I spend tracking US politics, the less faith I have in basic human intelligence; nevertheless, I would like to believe that at some point there will be a mass awakening from the madness that we have inflicted on ourselves in the name of the comfort and convenience of automobile. That someday we will realise that the price of our cars—in terms of time, money, space, human and animal life, and the climate crisis—is just too high, especially given that we could make our cities vastly more liveable if we dramatically reduced or eliminated the use of cars. It won't be easy—but neither is it easy to survive in our existing cities, as Dhaka residents can easily attest.

In any case, if idealism and hope are a crime, I'd rather be guilty of them than to accept that our existing polluted, congested, anti-social cities are the best we can do. And I hope that others will join me in these reflections (and watch my TEDx talk!) as we celebrate World Car Free Day and all the possibilities that could become reality if we were to dramatically reduce cars in our cities.

Debra Efroymson is executive director of the Institute of Wellbeing, Bangladesh, and an active member of the Carfree Cities Alliance.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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