Two years ago, an average neighbourhood in the South Korean city of Suwon embarked on a radical experiment ~ for one month, the neighbourhood got rid of every single one of their 1,500 cars.
Called the Ecomobility Festival, it was created as a way to help the city move much more quickly to a low-carbon future by helping citizens get a visceral sense of how that future could look.
“Usually in planning you do a computer simulation—an artificial picture of the future, and maybe a PowerPoint presentation,” says Konrad Otto-Zimmermann, creative director at The Urban Idea, who helped mastermind the festival. “We’re doing it in a different way: in a real city, with real people, in real time.”
The planning process took nearly two years and countless meetings to get support from skeptics. Finally, in September of 2013, 1,500 cars were moved out of the neighbourhood to parking lots elsewhere in the city. The city handed out 400 temporary bikes and electric scooters to neighbours, and set up a bike school to teach the many residents who didn’t know how to ride. Mail was delivered by electric vehicles. Shuttle buses ran every 15 minutes to take people to their cars.
The neighborhood transformed. Cafes and restaurants added new sidewalk seating, and the streets filled with people. It often looked a lot like car-free streets look during “Sunday Streets” events in other places, but the length of the experiment helped show how people could actually live without cars in everyday life.
After the festival ended, the city gathered residents for a huge meeting to ask for ideas for more permanent changes. The biggest result was that the speed limit was cut nearly in half, to about 18 miles (30 kilometres) per hour. That meant that commuters no longer wanted to use the neighbourhood as a shortcut, and traffic started to disappear. Every month, the community also hosts a car-free day.
Re~Post: Here’s What Happened When A Neighbourhood Decided To Ban Cars for a Month | FastCompany
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