World cities turn their streets over to walkers and cyclists

Agrowing number of cities around the world are temporarily reallocating road space from cars to people on foot and on cycles to keep key workers moving and residents in coronavirus lockdown healthy and active while socially distancing.

Limited urban park space and leisure trails are under increasing pressure, with many closed to prevent the spread of coronavirus, further limiting urban dwellers’ access to outdoor space. While traffic has dropped around the world, and with it nitrogen dioxide levels, there are widespread concerns over a rise in speeding drivers endangering those walking and cycling.

Evidence suggests air pollution, including from exhaust fumes, significantly harms the survival chances of those with Covid-19. With pedestrians crammed on to narrow pavements, and acres of empty asphalt on roads, lower speed limits, filtering residential streets to prevent rat-running, introducing emergency cycleways and expanding footpaths are among potential solutions.

Tabitha Combs, a lecturer at the University of North Carolina, is collating examples from around the world, adding to growing calls for more such measures.

“No matter where a city is on the spectrum of supporting walking and bicycling, there are actions that are within their reach, and precedents of those actions being implemented in peer cities around the globe,” she says.

In Philadelphia officials closed 4.7 miles of Martin Luther King Jr Drive, a wide riverside boulevard, to motor traffic on 20 March following an 1,100-strong petition, as leisure trails became overwhelmed by residents seeking their daily exercise.

Minneapolis has closed part of its riverfront parkways to motor vehicles. Denver has introduced pop-up cycling and walking lanes on 16th and 11th Avenues and roads around Sloan Lake to help people socially distance while exercising. On Thursday, Oakland officials said they were planning to close 74 miles of roads – 10% of the city’s total – to motor vehicles.

In Canada, Vancouver’s park board announced that Stanley Park is now cycling and walking only, as well as the linked eastbound lane of Beach Avenue, to relieve congestion and stop visitors arriving by car and parking dangerously, amid a 40% increase in park users. In Winnipeg, four streets are restricted to cycling and walking from 8am-8pm daily, and in Calgary traffic lanes have been reallocated to cycling.

Skaters wearing personal protective equipment on the seawall at Stanley Park in Vancouver

Like many cities, Budapest has seen a drop in bus use by almost 90%, with a 50% decrease in road traffic. City officials have now planned a cycling network on main roads.

Sydney, Perth and Adelaide in Australia, Chapel Hill in the US and Calgary in Canada are among the cities that have made pedestrian crossings automatic in some districts so that people do not have to press a button.

In Berlin, a slew of streets have new, wide bike lanes in place of some motor vehicle lanes. Bogotá has ambitiously replaced 35km of traffic lanes with new emergency bike lanes using temporary cones, mirroring the Colombian capital’s TransMilenio bus rapid transit network, an alternative to people using public transport. Workers adjust the lane width depending on usage.

In late March the bicycle mayor of Mexico City proposed 130km of temporary bike lanes. In the meantime, a 1.7km temporary lane, running 8am-7pm, has been installed on a major thoroughfare.

In the UK, however, it is a very different picture. In London, where traffic has dropped by 63% on main roads, walking and cycling commissioner Will Norman says emergency bike routes on the city’s arterial roads would not protect cyclists without complex junction improvements, which would require construction workers to travel during lockdown.

Cycling UK’s policy director, Roger Geffen, has suggested junctions could be redesigned while roads are quieter, saying temporary cycling infrastructure “provides a good experience to new commuters, while claiming that kerb space when it’s not under pressure and not as disruptive to make changes”.

Hackney council in east London is the first UK local authority openly planning to temporarily “filter” its streets, using bollards and planters to prevent rat-running while maintaining access for emergency vehicles and residents. Councillor Jon Burke says it will decide which streets to filter on 20 April, before starting work.

Burke told the Guardian pedestrians stepping into the road to socially distance from one another are put at risk by speeding drivers, whose number appears to be increasing during the lockdown. He says construction workers can operate while socially distancing, and it is one sector with excess capacity during the pandemic.

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“We are running around making sure vulnerable people have enough food but we aren’t doing something about the 40,000 people that are dying each year because of air pollution,” he says. “We haven’t got weeks to deliver it, we need to deliver it now, because this crisis is happening now.”

Dr Rachel Aldred, reader in transport at the University of Westminster, says the UK could learn from other countries. “It feels like they are treating [cycling] like a proper mode of transport and we are just fumbling around. There’s no guidance from the government … I think if they can manage it in Bogotá, which is a very complicated megacity with a lot of issues, you could imagine London doing similar,” she said, adding that much of the planning could be done remotely.

Transport engineer Brian Deegan says 20mph streets, bikes for key workers, and “core corridor” emergency cycle routes would help more essential staff cycle, while removing guard rails on pavements and extending pedestrian space using traffic cones would help those on foot. The London Cycling Campaign has also come up with short, medium and long-term proposals to improve active travel in the capital during the crisis.