Cars are pictured at a standstill in a traffic jam at rush hour in Bangkok on May 25, 2020, as Thais … [+]
Let me introduce you to Austrian civil engineer Dr. Hermann Knoflacher. This urban planner once led the Institute for Transport Planning and Technology at the Vienna University of Technology. Motor centric guy, then? Not a bit; he has described the car as a “virus” infecting the planet. Sound familiar?
The aptness continues: in the 1970s, Knoflacher created a social distancing device. The Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” was a visualization of how much space we devote to cars, especially those piloted alone.
Dr. Knoflacher and his “Walkmobile,” or Gehzeug.
The Gehzeug was a lightweight see-through wooden frame in the 3D shape of a full-sized motor car, yet could be easily balanced on a pedestrian’s shoulders. Knoflacher’s walkmobile was adapted and adopted by bicycle advocates around the world, and they are often wheeled out for cycle-focused demonstrations.
Montreal cycle advocacy group Le Monde à Bicyclette (literally, “The World of the Bicycle” and founded in 1975, a year after the ending of the 1970s bike boom) used these plywood polemics in rolling “cyclodramas” to demonstrate how much space the Canadian city would save if it catered not just to drivers of automobiles but people on bicycles, also.
And the guerrilla tactics worked. After several years of campaigning, this bunch of “vélorutionaries” successfully persuaded the left-leaning politicians of Montreal to provide for cyclists. Montreal now has almost 400 miles of cycleways, including a two-mile curb-protected cycleway in the center named for Silverman’s co-conspirator, Claire Morissette. Signs on the Piste Claire-Morissette state proudly that she was a “militante écologiste.”
The coronavirus crisis is firing up today’s “militant ecologists”—and that’s millions of people, if polls about how we want the future to unfold hold water.
Liveable-city advocates have been banging on about it for years, but during lockdown, it has become clear to almost everybody how much more delightful cities are without cars. Cleaner, quieter, safer. There’s a new normal, and it’s not necessarily as car-shaped as the old normal.
Totally crazy
Let’s return to Dr. Knoflacher. “The car is like a virus,” he told German newspaper Die Zeit in 2007. A virus that “settles in the brain and reverses the code of conduct, value system, and perception.”
Cars may be considered by those inside them to be ultra-safe in the current pandemic—some miscreants even treat them as mobile eye exams—but, for society as a whole, cars are far from benign.
“We are increasingly retreating into enclosed environments, more or less out of our own choice,” Knoflacher told Die Zeit, “while isolating ourselves from an outside world subjected to noise, pollution, and dust created by cars.”
He added: “A normal person would describe our current living space as totally crazy.”
Cities without cars would not die, stated Knoflacher, they would thrive.
Thanks to COVID-19 such concepts, once considered kooky, are now becoming mainstream. So much so that the U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, on May 23, told the nation: “Transport is not just about how we get from place to place. It also shapes the places; for good or bad.”
Speaking at the government’s daily coronavirus press conference, he added: “We now have an opportunity to use the power of transport to improve long-standing national weaknesses, and create something better.”
U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. (Photo by Peter Summers/Getty Images)
Before we take the Damascene conversion of Shapps at face value, we have to consider that the U.K. government also plans a “£90 billion upgrade of England’s motorways and main A-roads despite commitments during the pandemic to fund green transport,” reported The Times on May 26.
From this we may infer that motorists are to be pandered to with fast roads between cities but, according to Shapps, they will then be prevented from entering cities with their motor cars.
In his May 23 statement, reporting of which was obscured by the growing scandal over the lockdown breaches by Boris Johnson’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings, Shapps said that “we will repurpose parking in places just outside town centers” for those who “must drive to major conurbations.”
“So,” he continued, “people can park on the outskirts and finish their journeys on foot or bike or even e-scooter.”
He predicted that we would not “return to how things were” but “come out of this recovery stronger, by permanently changing the way we use transport.”
Shapps stressed that the government would be “speeding up the cycling revolution, helping individuals become fitter and healthier. And reducing air pollution, which remains a hidden killer.”
Heady stuff from a U.K. Transport Secretary especially considering that, in March, his department released a plan to “decarbonize” transport and in the foreword to this document, Shapps wrote that, in the future, “we will use our cars less.”
It might be a step too far to think that Shapps could ever describe the use of a cars as a disease to be cured but, then, until just a few months ago it would have been unthinkable for the U.K.’s Transport Secretary to say he “celebrated the idea that there are fewer cars on the road,” but that’s what he told Sky News on April 17, marvelling that the “level of car use is the equivalent to 1955.”
Car use is creeping back up—Dr. Knoflacher’s “virus” is returning as lockdowns are eased—but plenty of politicians are now on board with the concept that this is a pandemic that, through urban design, can be be prevented in the future.
