Clean air, safer streets and a stable climate are among the reasons doctors and environmental experts want fewer cars clogging our roads. Reduced dependence on fuel – especially when prices are high and most countries rely on imports – is another.
Yet while some cities with world-class public transport are debating how to tackle the stubborn minority of journeys still made by car, others – particularly in the US – have become so dependent on driving that opting out is almost impossible.
From connecting commuter suburbs to persuading royals to use buses, here are four expert-backed ways for tackling car culture.
1. Expand and improve public transport
The shift from fuel-burning cars to electric ones greatly reduces planet-heating pollution but does not make streets safer. For that, people need reliable options for getting around.
“Making sure public transport can meet the mobility needs of residents is step one,” says Alissa Kendall, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. “If travel is prohibitively slow, if it doesn’t get you to where you need to go, it will never encourage those wealthy enough to own and operate a car to stop buying and using them – and it won’t serve the needs of those who are transit dependent.”
Sprawling cities such as those in North America are harder to connect than denser urban areas common in Europe and Asia. Even so, getting people out of cars and into buses could still save money. Free bus travel, for example, became a centrepiece of Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York mayoral campaign, but research suggests lower-cost tickets have only a limited effect on reducing car use.
Matthias Cremer-Schulte, a transport researcher at the Technical University of Dortmund, says: “The people who benefit most are often those who were already using public transport. The ones who really matter for reducing car use – people who drive because they need the flexibility – are rarely tempted by a cheaper bus ticket alone.”
As cars came to dominate cities after the second world war, public space was redesigned around them. Pedestrians were relegated to narrow pavements and cyclists had to decide whether riding a bike on the road was worth the risk to their life.
A GVB tram in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Photograph: Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images Giving road space back to other forms of transport is one of the most powerful tools that cities have to get people out of cars. By carving out lanes for bikes, converting parking spaces into green areas and pedestrianising streets, mayors can encourage active forms of travel by making it safer and more convenient.
Measures sometimes criticised as a “war on motorists” are often, in reality, attempts to manage limited public space more efficiently, says Hannah Budnitz, a researcher at the transport studies unit of the University of Oxford. Cars are among the least space-efficient ways of moving people from A to B, especially in rush-hour traffic, and spend most of their time parked.
“If you only need a car once a week, you can’t have a seventh of a car,” Budnitz says. “If you only need a large vehicle that can take a trailer for your annual camping trip, you can’t have 4% of that car.”
To avoid the public backlash that comes with reducing road space, some cities, such as Münster in Germany, have run experiments in which streets have been closed to cars for a few months to let residents experience the difference first-hand. A similar approach has been used in Stockholm, which trialled pairing a congestion charge with expanded public transport before putting the policy to a referendum.
“Most of the time, once people have lived with it, the opposition softens,” says Cremer-Schulte. “Other cities struggle to do this because local politicians are understandably nervous – nobody wants to lose an election over a bike lane.”
3. Focus on suburbs
A dedicated cycle lane in Copenhagen city centre. Photograph: UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam have shown it is possible to reduce car use to fewer than one in three journeys by investing in reliable public transport and extensive bike lanes. Yet many of the vehicles that remain on city roads come from outside urban centres.
“This mismatch between where people live and where people work is what entails such big problems,” says Susana López-Aparicio, a deputy director of the urban environment department at NILU, a Norwegian research institute. “We see at eight in the morning all European cities are affected by commuting and heavy traffic.”
Improving public transport in outer suburbs and commuter belts – areas often beyond the direct control of city mayors – can give people viable alternatives to driving. Ensuring more towns have essential amenities within walking distance – a concept known as the “15-minute city” – can also reduce the need for long journeys.
López-Aparicio observed this in a study on urban sprawl in Warsaw, Poland, and experienced it herself when she moved closer to the centre of Oslo from a house on the outskirts. “I have not only more public transport available, but also the supermarket, the post office, the hairdresser – all these things I can do by walking.”
4. Understand why people drive
In rural villages, where frequent public transport can be too costly to provide, or for people with certain disabilities, cars can be a lifeline for accessing work and services. But for many others, car-free options could be prove more attractive with just a few changes.
A cobbled shopping street in Stavanger, Norway. Using public transport carries little cultural baggage in many parts of Europe. Photograph: Alan Keith Beastall/Alamy Understanding why people drive is the first step to reducing car dependence. In many European cities, public transport can look “quite homogeneous” at night because it is mostly used by young men who feel safe enough to travel, says Brian Caulfield, a transportation professor at Trinity College Dublin. “With deeper consultation, you can uncover the barriers that people have to using public transport, walking or cycling. When you better understand that, then you can better design alternative solutions.”
Those fixes can range from extending late-night public transport services and improving street lighting to introducing community car-sharing schemes in villages and small towns, where some drivers rarely need to use their cars.
At the same time, normalising the use of public transport can help challenge social stigma. In North America, for example, buses and trains are often associated with poverty and crime, while in much of Europe and Asia public transport carries far less cultural baggage.
In Norway, the former king Olav V rode the subway during the 1973 oil crisis to encourage people to avoid driving. Today, members of the royal family are still regularly spotted using trams and buses.
“Taking public transport is not something that you do because you are poor,” said López-Aparicio. “It is something that you do for the common wealth of the whole society.”
