Climate Chang
Smart Trave
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l
In the early 1960s, with Copenhagen, Denmark
seemingly prepared to parrot Houston, Texas as a
city of overpasses, the Danish capital’s citizens
stopped an under-construction freeway rather than
lose a string of beautiful mid-town lakes.
Today the city has a booming outdoor café culture,
four highly successful pedestrian-and-bicyclist-only
shopping streets and 36 per cent of commuters arrive
on two-wheels.
In 1978, a newspaper article declared downtown Mel-
bourne, Australia “an empty, useless city center” but a
decade after the city decided to increase pedestrian
and bicycle traffic, the number of downtown residents
had increased 830 per cent and the number of cafes,
restaurants and bars more than tripled.
In 1991, Oxford, England closed several city streets to
private vehicles during working hours and within a dec-
ade downtown congestion all-but disappeared as 14,000
fewer cars were making daily trips into the city center.
In 1997, Perth, Australia introduced an educational
transportation behavioral change program and today
the freeway-and-suburbs area is decreasing car trips by
30m, greenhouse gas emissions by 88m tons and
increasing physical fitness hours by 7m annually.
In 2003, London, England added congestion charges
on the 16 radial roads into downtown and within two
years 119,000 citizens were daily commuting by bicy-
cle, battling the world’s second largest national obesity
problem.
www.thinkinghighways.com Thinking Highways Vol 4 No 1 51
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