Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Coming to America: the Swiss solution for car congestion

Switzerland's capital city has long been admired as a leader on urban parking policy.  But it's imitation, not just admiration, that is the sincerest form of flattery:
Zurich's Paradeplatz then...
The Paradeplatz is a classic public square at the heart of a historic European city. It is surrounded by elegant buildings constructed in architectural styles that date back several centuries. Just as it was in the early 1900s, it is car-free.
Paradeplatz is in the center of Zurich, and it pulses with pedestrians, bicyclists and trams. Pleasantly missing are parked cars. No parking is allowed on the Paradeplatz or on other squares and streets in the city. It is the result of a parking policy that sets a maximum rather than a minimum number of spaces that the city center allows.  [...]
Zurich has existed for nearly 2,000 years, but in the 1950s and ’60s, increased car ownership began to change the city’s character, congesting the streets and turning its once-elegant public squares into parking lots. In 1989, the city decided to regulate parking by setting a cap on the number of spaces allowed in certain districts.  [...]
Now the movement is coming stateside. Cambridge, Mass.; Nashville, Tenn.; Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C., are all considering setting maximum parking limits. It’s a welcome change even if it’s just a start, says Garrick. Before there had been no “attempt to establish how parking was used,” he says. “[Even today] most American cities don’t know how much parking they have. The results have been devastating to the livability of a city’s urban core.”
...and now.  Still car-free!
(at Governing)