Imagine downtown Santa Barbara as a vibrant, car-free city center. Oslo, Norway, and some other cities scattered around the world are well on their way to creating such urban zones.
In the last year, Oslo has removed more than 700 downtown parking places and replaced them with red-painted bike lanes, pocket parks, and sitting areas. After listening to concerns from some car owners and businesses, the city adopted this more gradual approach of removing parking, while postponing its ultimate goal of a complete downtown ban on cars. The worry of business owners was that the center would become a ghost town that no one would visit. The opposite seems to be happening; after removing hundreds of parking spaces, there has been an increase of pedestrians by more than 10 percent over the previous year. This pattern has been borne out in many other cities that have converted downtown streets to pedestrian-only areas. These areas are often the most popular parts of a city.
In the 1970s, Oslo created a number of pedestrian-only central streets. In the 1980s, it made major investments in improving its public transportation. Oslo’s most recent effort, removing parking, has the goal of improving air quality and fighting climate change. The impact on quality of life, however, has been the more immediate and impactful change. Oslo’s municipal government is even encouraging more people to bicycle by giving out grants for citizens to buy electric bikes.