The Suburb That Tried To Kill the Car

Guerrilla urbanism by groups like Chattanooga Urbanist Society develop low-cost, short-term interventions to community problems, like installing bike lanes and painting crosswalks, to fill gaps left by local government. Chattanooga Urbanist Society is focused on making the city more pedestrian-friendly and has installed more than 60 benches in the area. The group also accepts service requests from locals to handle issues the local government hasn’t touched.

After decades of planning and development, Sacramento’s R Street corridor went from an area full of abandoned warehouses to a flourishing, walkable neighborhood. The city planners’ prioritization of building high-density housing, bringing in new businesses, ensuring access to a light rail transit line, and safe, pedestrian-friendly streets helped this project succeed.

In February, municipal authorities in Paris began installing sound radar devices in the city as part of a slew of measures taken since 2015 to address noise pollution, an issue which is being considered more seriously as a public health risk. Holistic measures like installing sound-barriers, low-noise asphalt, vehicle-restrictions, and housing regulations have already reduced the average noise level by two decibels and brought down the number of people living in noisy environments.

Milwaukee is poised to pass a complete streets policy that would advance current efforts to make the city more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. But even without this policy in place, projects to widen sidewalk and improve bike infrastructure are paying off with more business openings and plans by developers who chose the city because of those efforts. The city council is supporting complete streets but it will need cooperation from state highway officials for some of those thoroughfares.

A Dallas urban neighborhood was dilapidated with abandoned storefronts and offered no vitality for pedestrians. A group of artists and community members created Build a Better Block, in which local artisans and small businesses took over a vacant block and transformed it for a limited time to encourage the ingredients for more permanent urban renewal.

The city of Lancaster invested nearly $12 million to create a walkable mixed-use development area along a main thoroughfare, with nine blocks of businesses and community spaces such as a library and a museum. The development has generated more than $270 million in economic output and residents say the area is now welcoming and encourages a sense of community.

Barcelona's network of climate shelters, which began in 2020 with 70 locations, has become an international benchmark for protecting citizens against the heat. By 2023, 68% of citizens had a climate shelter within a five-minute walk of their home, and 98% of citizens had one within ten minutes.

Cities are revitalizing neglected neighborhoods by turning them into 20-Minute Neighborhoods where all non-work needs are within 20 minutes of travel without a car.

The city of Hoboken uses “Daylighting” – city planning prioritizing infrastructure changes to increase pedestrian and traffic safety, which has prevented traffic-related fatalities since 2018. Interventions include bike lanes, curb extensions, bus lanes, high-visibility crosswalks, and raised intersections.

Citizen participation in meetings, door-to-door surveys, and via an open-source online platform where residents could edit and add to draft plans resulted in 7,000 citizen proposals to redesign one of Bogota’s major, car-choked, 23-km thoroughfares. Residents as young as 10 years old contributed to design plans that will cut climate-changing emissions and pollution by adding more bike lanes, pedestrian paths, and electric buses and cable cars. City officials spent substantial time listening to residents’ ideas and concerns, including talking with populations that are often ignored by those in power.