index > New Ideas for the Earth > How to Create a City without Automobiles
 
 How to Create a City without AutomobilesThere are other ways to get around than by carThere is a city called Curitiba in Brazil, in South America. In 1950 about 150,000 people lived there, and at that time the city's population was predicted to grow 10 times larger and reach 1.5 million in 50 years."Well then, we will have to plan a city accordingly," said the people of Curitiba. They invited architects to enter a contest in 1965 to design Curitiba's city plan for the future. Out of many applicants, a master plan by a young architect named Jaime Lerner was selected. Mr. Lerner later became the mayor of Curitiba and aggressively promoted his city plan. The first thing he did was to make a traffic system where people did not need to depend on automobiles to get around the city. There is no railway in Curitiba, so Lerner made four major innovations in the city traffic system as follows. 1) He made very useful and effective bus lines all over the city, five lines ran outwards from the city center across the city, and triple loop lines linked all of them. By changing buses twice or three times in the system, anyone could go from anywhere in the city to anywhere else. 2) He allocated use of land in the city to centralize the population near the bus lines; the closer a property was to a bus route, the better the chance the permit for building a skyscraper would be approved. He also built public facilities such as hospitals, the city hall and civic centers near key bus stops. 3) Lerner also made the bus service friendlier to citizens. Bus fares are about U.S.$0.68 per ride, no matter how often you transfer or how far you ride. The buses have low floors so that everyone including the elderly and those in wheelchairs can easily get on and off. Bus stop shelters are shaped like big tubes to prevent passengers from getting wet in the rain. 4) On the roads, buses have priority over private cars. The bus lanes, separated with traffic dividers, are completely closed to other cars. So, even when traffic is jammed, buses run smoothly past the long line of cars. That's a rare scene in Japan, where private cars and trucks are often seen traveling in bus lanes! In Curitiba, these innovations helped reduce the number of cars on the road by 30 percent. The city has also been able to save a great deal of money that would otherwise be spent on anti-pollution measures as well as medical costs for asthma patients, whose condition is worsened by exhaust fumes. On top of that, these four innovations contributed to cleaner air, and that has improved citizens' quality of life. With many other various environmental efforts, Curitiba is well known as a model city, friendly to both the earth and its citizens. Today many people around the world visit Curitiba to see these innovations first-hand. Similar efforts to promote the reduction of private car use have gradually spread to European cities as well. I hope cities in Japan will follow Curitiba's example and shift from a car-oriented society to a society in which pedestrians and bikes can safely move around. The important thing is to have a system that encourages citizens to actively work toward an ecological society.
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