Beautiful Streets, Car-Free Neighborhoods, and Traffic Calming Emojis
By: Mike Sellinger, Planning Associate, Alta
This past fall, aided by Alta’s 5-year travel benefit, I explored Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, and Munich, along with quick trips to the mountains in Andorra and islands of the Azores. I came away inspired by endless vibrant streets and with a renewed belief in the power of streets that prioritize people first. Here are a few of my takeaways from the trip and why I think Barcelona is primed for a biking explosion.
- Pedestrians are king. The sheer volume of trips on foot in these cities means pedestrians come first in most settings — typically through excellent physical protection, slow motor vehicle speeds, and quality crossings. The narrow streets in the historic core of each of these cities have small sidewalks (often with bollards) but also slow speeds, allowing people to utilize the full street when no traffic is present and easily move to the sidewalk when a car approaches. Every city I visited provided car-free spaces on a scale that doesn’t exist back home. You’re never more than a few feet from a plaza, park, or walkway that is delightful to stroll through. On the flip side, accommodations for people with disabilities are intermittent. Common issues I saw were inadequate crossing times, lack of curb ramps, and, of course, cobblestone streets.
- Quality bike infrastructure is a political choice. None of these cities suffer from the sprawl and auto-oriented development that ails most of our cities back home, however, the quality of bike infrastructure varies tremendously. Munich and Barcelona have high-quality infrastructure throughout, while Madrid lacks basic infrastructure, and in Lisbon, there is only a scattering of “bike lanes to nowhere” as one person I spoke to put it. In fact, this local tuk tuk driver and bike commuter mentioned the latest government was currently ripping out a couple bike projects the previous administration had implemented.
- Shared micromobility is flourishing: Each city has a number of shared mobility options, typically including both docked and dockless bike share, e-scooters, and mopeds. The streets, bike lanes or not, were full of these burgeoning modes, and they clearly have become an integral part of the transportation ecosystem.
- Finally, while the US probably can’t make streets as interesting as many typical European streets with the mix of elements from across centuries, we can still design streets for people that are just as safe and efficient for getting people where they need to go.
Andorra — Traffic calming through emojis?
Andorra, the tiny mountainous country in the Pyrenees between Spain and France is full of steep passes and tight turns. To create safe and pleasant crossings, most crosswalks come equipped with a traffic signal — plus an emoji! Depending on your speed as you approach the signal, you either get a positive or negative emoji. While I wasn’t able to find any research on the effectiveness of this emotive feedback, I can personally say I felt a crushing disappointment in myself after getting an angry face coming around a curve and made sure it never happened again.
Barcelona — the next biking capital?
Barcelona is not usually touted as one of the world’s great biking cities with the likes of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, but I was blown away by its bike network! Rather than chart out a bike route before setting out like I would in any American city, I was free to pedal any direction, confident I would never have more than a block or two to go to find a low-stress facility.
Barcelona doesn’t have much history as a biking city, but the introduction of its bike share system, Bicing, seems to have lit a spark. Bicing is now one of the most successful bike share systems in the world with 6,000 bikes and an astronomical utilization rate of over eight trips per bike per day (for comparison most US systems are lucky to get one or two trips per bike per day) — and it doesn’t even allow the millions of tourists to use it.
Following the bike share system came the infrastructure. Spurred on by some of the worst air quality in Europe, Barcelona went all in on its bike network. The results are a veritable hodgepodge of protected bike lanes, paths, and slow streets with dozens of configurations and different materials. These may not be the prettiest bike lanes in the world, but they form a complete network.
I couldn’t travel to Barcelona without checking out the superblocks: sections of neighborhoods (typically around nine square blocks) where all of the internal streets are closed to cars and open for people. Currently, a handful are open, with hundreds more planned across the city. Taken together with the rapid implementation of the protected bike lane network and incredible rapid transit system (3-minute headways on the subway!), Barcelona is poised to drastically reduce car use and pollution in the near future. The biking numbers haven’t come to fruition, but it feels like the culture is about to change. I’ll leave you with this sign (and adorable video if you scroll down a bit) of hundreds of kids biking to school together on a bicibús.
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