People-Centric Urban Transportation: Why urban planners need to think about communities, not cars

Earlier this month, Stockholm announced a plan to ban diesel-and-gas-powered vehicles from entering large parts of its city center, in one of the world’s most far-reaching efforts to combat automobile emissions. It also potentially marks the beginning of the end for a form of transport that came to define urban landscapes. Indeed, one survey of US cities showed that downtowns devote an astonishing 50 to 60 percent of their space to vehicles.

While this situation wasn’t really questioned by planners for many decades, today, there is a growing environmental and social movement to re-imagine urban transport systems with people, rather than cars, at the center. Here are a few options that policymakers might consider.