Check out the episode:

You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in how removing traffic affects urban areas?

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Our debate today works with the article titled Scaling the superblock model to city level in Barcelona? Learning from recent policy impact evaluations from 2022, by Jaime Benavides, Sabah Usmani, and Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, published in the Contesti journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Ben Wolf in episode 424 talking about one street in New York that reduced its car traffic and its effects on its environment.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see an urban model that curtails vehicle traffic and reclaims public space for pedestrians and greenery. This article investigates Barcelona’s Superblock model with its complex outcomes, suggesting that neighbourhood level policies must be paired with a holistic metropolitan mobility plan for traffic to be effectively reduced city-wide.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: Evaluating the intended and unintended environmental health impacts of urban policies is critical for designing and implementing policies that promote healthier urban living. This paper evaluates the Barcelona Superblock model — a policy aiming to reduce road traffic and increase other uses of the public space such as active mobility — during its design and recent implementation stages, with a focus on its traffic reduction benefits. Its design assumed that Superblocks would cover the entire city, potentially reducing overall road traffic by more than 20% due to the “evaporation” of road traffic from this large-scale reallocation of streets. This reduction is necessary to improve environmental health conditions in the city, where traffic density accounts for about 5,500 vehicles per km2 in the most congested areas. Recent estimations in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown found that a 25-30% reduction of road traffic is required to comply with European annual NO2 concentration standards. Thus, according to the impact evaluation of its design, an entire-city deployment of Superblocks would accomplish most of this necessary reduction. However, to date only three pilot intervention areas have been implemented in the city and two evaluations of their actual impacts provided complementary results: Superblocks are beneficial in pedestrianized streets but may be detrimental in streets influenced by the rebound effect of traffic redistribution. Previous studies have suggested that similar interventions reallocating road space from motorized vehicles to other uses can lead to traffic redistribution to nearby streets while reducing overall traffic levels on the whole network. Here, we argue that in cities with very high circulating traffic density, like Barcelona, Superblocks need to be accompanied by urban policies that reduce traffic in the city as a whole. Specifically, developing policies that could reduce overall traffic in the entire city — e.g., a congestion charge — could ease the implementation of Superblocks by freeing space from cars and providing economic resources to implement the necessary transformation of public space.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.216 – Interview with Sara Stace about the needed urban paradigm shift in transport planning
• No.395R – Car free cities
• No.396 – Interview with Lior Steinberg about car free cities

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