Keywords: Reduce car dominance, densification, urban design, city strategy, policy, mobility, car-free, car-low
In 2018, 55% of the global population lived in cities.
This number is still increasing and will reach its peak
in 2050, with almost 70% of the world population living in cities. The mentality evolved in the past century,
described as the ‘century of the car’, has had a major
impact on the development of cities and accessibility
of urban centres. Although the world population, especially in Europe, benefitted from the introduction
of the car, many problems are linked to private car
ownership. There are numerous examples of cities
developing strategies for banning cars from their city
centre and stimulate public transport (PT), cycling and
walking. Nevertheless, the continuously increasing
number of cars worldwide is expected to reach 2 billion in 2030. In cities like Copenhagen, Oslo, Madrid,
London and Paris, the municipality has implemented
policies to restrict or ban cars from parts of the city.
Dutch cities are directly linked to great cycling infrastructure, larger cities have pedestrianized their
centres and have implemented other car reducing
measures. Although this might suggest a successful reduction of cars in Dutch cities, the opposite is
true: the number of cars increased with 1.5 percent
in 2021 (compared to 2020) and the number of kilometres driven, increased with 4.8 percent. The city of
Arnhem joined forces with the city of Nijmegen in the
regional collaboration of ‘the Groene Metropoolregio’
to ensure the development of almost 100.000 houses
in the province of Gelderland. This densification assignment requires a new way of looking at cities in
terms of land use and transport system. In literature,
there is a lot of information on car restricting, sharing
and banning policies and design implementations,
which is aimed for direct change in either land use
or transport network. Although there are numerous
articles discussing different measures to reduce car
dominance, this information is scattered, and context of location and historical development are often
neglected. Moreover, the involvement of the user is
often missing in car dominance reduction measures.
Before introducing interventions that affect land
use and infrastructure, awareness should be raised.
An overview of available interventions on societal
and individual level, a proper assessment of spatial
and contextual characteristics of the location where
these interventions are to be implemented and their
potential for supporting these policies is needed to
operationalize the phased reduction of car usage in
Dutch cities. Therefore, this paper aims to answer the
following research question: To what extent can the
densifying city of Arnhem become car-free, and how
can this car-free concept be strategized?
The first part of this work presents a literature review.
This review summarizes the historical development
of the car and the reaction in urban development,
presents an overview of available interventions and
discusses the collaboration of stakeholders. These
three elements were then used to analyse three case
studies. These case studies and results from literature form the basis on which an approach (toolbox
and decision tree) is founded. The second part of this
work presents a city strategy and a neighbourhood
design, which demonstrates the implementation of
different interventions.
This article examines a total of 26 articles and three
case studies, presenting an elaborate overview of 10
intervention categories containing 66 interventions
across various scales. These interventions require
push and pull strategies, stakeholder management,
an overview of future development plans and working across different scales. Combing these points of
attention and the approach, the interventions prove
to be valuable in reducing car dominance in cities.