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 d
