Urban Europe looks to future without cars: Christian Wolmar reports from Amsterdam on a new transport initiative and looks at three traffic management policies

A concerted attempt to stem the inexorable growth in car use was launched yesterday when 34 European communities formed the Car Free Cities Club.

The cities, which include Leeds, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, will, according to Laurens- Jan Brinkhorst, the European Commission's director general of environment, nuclear safety and civil protection, 'work towards the gradual reduction of private cars in urban areas and possibly towards a complete ban on the use of private cars for transport not related to economic activity in cities'.

Mr Brinkhorst was speaking at the club's first conference held yesterday and today in Amsterdam and sponsored by the Commission.

Earlier this week, Steven Norris, minister for transport in London, expressed concern at statistics showing that the number of cars entering the capital at peak times had risen by a quarter in the past decade. One member of the club, Copenhagen, has managed to cut the number of cars coming into its city centre by 10 per cent since 1970.

While 'car-free' centres may be a somewhat fanciful notion, cities across Europe are attempting to curb car use with varied degrees of success. In Italy, cars have been banned from several historic city centres and in Switzerland car use is strictly regulated in cities like Berne and Zurich. In the Norwegian capital, Oslo, every car entering the city centre pays a toll.

The damage to the environment caused by cars is widely recognised, but, according to one of the speakers, Professor Toon van der Horn, Professor of Transportation at Amsterdam University, traffic reduction measures can be equally damaging to the prosperity of cities unless they are properly planned.

He said: 'Housing and employment will migrate to the outside of cities creating circular movements round cities which are much more difficult to provide public transport for than radial journeys.'

There would be a loss of jobs, which would also result in damage to trade for shops, and city centres would be turned into deserts at night. However, these problems were not insuperable. Car bans, for example, could be lifted at night and offices turned into housing.

He backed the creation of a company which would develop traffic calming measures and compensete firms damaged by them, using funds from parking charges and grants from local councils.

But is a car-free city feasible in the near future? Peter Guller, director of the Swiss National Research Programme on cities and transport in Zurich, said that on the same day last month that the Swiss voted to ban foreign lorries crossing the Alps, the medium-size city of St Gall voted on whether to have a car- free city. 'One-third voted for the proposition, a considerable success for those who put forward the initiative,' he said.

He pointed out that Carlo Ripa di Meana, the former EC environment commissioner, had calculated in the early Nineties that a car-free city with a comprehensive public transport system would cost 'two to five times less to its inhabitants than the city with motorised individual transport'.

Mr Guller has calculated that the hidden cost to the environment of car use in Zurich and Berne is about 7p per passenger kilometre in terms of noise, air pollution, accidents and effect on the climate. If those costs were properly taxed, public transport could be funded from the revenue. Although he did not think car-free cities were likely in the near future unless there were another energy crisis, he said: 'The implementation of car-free cities is less a technical and planning problem than a political one.'

However, in Britain we seem much further off than in Europe. The only city making a presentation at the conference was London and the topic was the Red Routes initiative which aims to speed up the journeys of car commuters on main routes into the capital.

Leading article, page 17

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