Volts podcast: Kimberly Nicholas on the best ways to get cars out of cities

In this episode, Kimberly Nicholas discusses her published research on the most effective policies to reduce car use in cities.

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David Roberts

In the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the nice word? … nascent. But in Europe, where many cities were built before cars and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there is growing agreement that cars need to be reigned in. It’s partly about fighting climate change, but beyond that it’s about quality of life — living without air and noise pollution, using your legs to get around, and enjoying public spaces.

More and more European cities are discovering what Copenhagen found when it studied the problem in earnest: every mile traveled on a bike adds value to a city, whereas every mile traveled in a car subtracts value.

The pushback against cars in the Europe has been going on for decades now, but there has been little effort to catalogue and rank the various policies and initiatives involved. What works and what doesn’t? What should other cities prioritize?

Into that breach came a recent research paper in Case Studies on Transport Policy that dove into the academic literature (surveying 800 papers) to rank the top car-reducing strategies. It was co-authored by Paula Kuss (based on her master’s research) and Kimberly Nicholas of Sweden’s Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. Nicholas later wrote a summary of the research for The Conversation that received an enormous amount of attention.

As it happens, driving cars out of cities is one of my enduring obsessions, so I eagerly accepted Nicholas’ offer to review the research, discuss the themes evident in the top-performing policies, and ponder whether such policies could ever take hold in the US. Our conversation was enlightening and heartening, despite making me want to move to Europe.

With no further ado, Kim Nicholas. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.

Kimberly Nicholas

Thank you so much. Long-time listener, first-time guest.

David Roberts

I want to talk about your study, but before we jump in, there's just a couple of kind of background things I want to establish. One point, which you emphasize a couple of times, which I don't feel like is super well understood. I feel like a lot of times, in my experience, when we talk about declining cars, or trying to get rid of cars, or blocking cars, or anything that inhibits cars, it strikes people, I think, intuitively as a punishment to the poor. And the point you make, at the top of your post about your paper, is that this is not in fact, the case.

In fact, the sort of transportation sector is weighted as it is toward the wealthier. So say just a little bit about that by way of background.

Kimberly Nicholas

Yeah, I think that's so important that people understand that it is overwhelmingly the rich who drive the most, and it's very important to design climate and transport policies that simultaneously tackle the very serious and increasing problem of inequality. But that's fully possible to do. Some of the people who benefit the most from active and public transport are lower-income folks. So our study focused on Europe because Europe actually has a policy to ...

David Roberts

Study.

Kimberly Nicholas

Exactly. The European Union has promised to deliver 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030. And those cities have just been chosen. And in order for that to actually happen, cities have to reduce the number of cars.

And when we look in Europe, the data show that it's the rich who drive the most, the richest 10%, about 21% of their emissions comes from driving. And they take up so much more space in cities, which is something we often don't think about. But in Berlin, for example, it's three and a half times more public space that goes to car drivers than non-car drivers. So the car really is a tool to increase inequality.

David Roberts

And that's just parking mostly, right? That public space?

Kimberly Nicholas

Largely parking. Also roads and other car infrastructure. In Sweden, it's about 100 m², roughly 1000 square feet. That's the size of many apartments in cities, here. So you think, "Okay, what value could we get for that land? That could be public parks, that could be more housing where we need it in cities." And it's just a really inefficient use of space.

David Roberts

And you make the point that EU is doing fairly well on some climate metrics, but its transportation sector is actually kind of a little bit of its Achilles' heel. It's not on a good trajectory.

Kimberly Nicholas

No. And I think that this is really something that it's important for the world to take a look at because to get down to zero emissions and actually stop climate change, the first thing is to produce a lot of clean energy. And I think listeners to your podcast are well aware of that, and you talk about that a lot. But then you have to electrify everything to run on that clean energy. And transport is the next sort of phase. And you see in some of the earlier leaders at the national level, Sweden is one of them, where emissions have been declining too slowly, but they are on the way down.

California is a state in the US that's the same, where they're making the transition to produce clean energy, but they're not yet, or they're just really starting to gain traction in electrifying cars to run on that clean energy. And they're not tackling the need to reduce cars and switch to the need for less mobility and sustainable mobility.

David Roberts

What is that case? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of people, especially new to this area, sort of think, "Well, transportation runs on gas, switch it over to run on clean electricity, and you're good." I think that lots of people think that's most of the solution, and I think a lot of people also think that that's faster to do that than to change cities. So what's the case for trying to reduce overall vehicle miles traveled alongside electrification?

Kimberly Nicholas

Well, the climate case is that we won't meet climate goals unless we do that, and the inequality case is that we'll continue to exacerbate inequality unless we do that. So I think that's a very strong case because if we're serious about these goals, and actually making cities safer and healthier and more fair and nice places to live, we actually need to focus on reducing cars. And a lot of cities are starting to realize that, especially in Europe, but also elsewhere. I mean the US does have a lot of work and activism and research showing the need to actually reduce cars.

And I think the IPCC, the UN Climate Panel, has started to pick this up, and their latest report focused on this "avoid-shift-improve" model, which I think is really helpful because, for a long time, climate policy has really been focused on