Transcript
Speaker: When you're in a city, how do you get from a to B? Maybe you're listening to this on a bus or a train right now. Many cities are thinking hard about how people move around where they live.
Speaker: All of them need good, but possibly different answers to a common problem. Too many private car journeys over walking and cycling or buses and train. Mobility.
Speaker: How people get around or struggle to changes the entire experience of a city. In this episode, we'll find out from our guests that the trade-offs to make more space for people are not always easy, but the benefits can be enjoyed by all.
Speaker: Hi, I'm Sean Eyrie and you're listening to Path to Zero City Stories. Across Europe and beyond, cities are on a mission, quite literally. In 2022, 112 cities joined the EU mission for climate neutral and smart cities, committing to reach climate neutrality by 2030.
Speaker: But there's no single route to that goal. Each city charts its own way forward and through this mini-series, we let them tell you how.
Speaker: What is happening to a city is not only a transport story, but a story of ah transformation. My name is Yanis Armeftis. I'm the mayor of Limassol from Cyprus.
Speaker: And the Limassol story. Limassol has grown rapidly in the recent years. We are the fastest growing urban areas in Cyprus. ah We are multicultural city. We are the port city.
Speaker: This ah growth investments, ah jobs, and new opportunities. ah Last year, the population increased rapidly, and that brought congestion, increased car dependency.
Speaker: I mean, all the movements are more than 90% done by car. We are in a turning point. Mobility is no longer, let's say, a purely technical issue.
Speaker: It's directly linked with the quality of life of the citizens, the public health, economic activity, and of course, and that transforms and the future identity of the city.
Speaker: With 3,000 citizens making more than 9 out of 10 journeys by car, there are always public discussions about the need for more roads and more parking. But Limassol already has substantially less green space than the European average, a fact that is hard to change if more and more space is kept for cars.
Speaker: We'll find out more about how Limassol is trying to encourage people to embrace different means of transport. First, let's hear from the opposite corner of Europe where the context is quite different.
Speaker: But citizens also face how choices about mobility are choices that shape cities. I think what has been important in Oslo is creating the possibility or making it the easiest choice to travel climate-friendly.
Speaker: So travel with public transport, walking and biking. My name is Hilde Soli and I work at the Agency for Climate at the municipality of Oslo.
Speaker: and Walking is a very important mobility mode ah in Oslo. People walk a lot. particularly in the central city, but also in the suburbs and more outskirts of the city. um And we have worked with public transport for a very long time, which means that we have a very robust public transport city. That's a very, and I think, a great offer to the population in the city.
Speaker: making it the easiest choice. in In most cities, the easiest choice is still the car, and it's where infrastructure, habits, and expectations all point. Changing that default is a big challenge for cities that want to help citizens and visitors get around in a greener and healthier way.
Speaker: Norway's national government has set the country's largest cities a target of zero growth of private car use. But Oslo itself aims to even reduce traffic by 30% by 2030. Switching lanes for cars to lanes for public transportation and giving up car parking spots to make room for bike lanes and pedestrians. The city is focused on making alternatives to car travel much more appealing.
Speaker: Between 2015 and 2023, Oslo installed 155 kilometers of new and upgraded cycling infrastructure and, combined with efforts to improve traffic safety over the same time period, the city has reduced the risk of fatal or serious cycling collisions by 47%.
Speaker: How did Oslo begin its journey of improving mobility? The answer goes right back to the decisions made in the post-war years when the city was growing fast and needed to house a lot of people... quickly The city was built around the subway line. So it's the city was really expanded on yeah green land or unbuilt land. This is similar to what I think Stockholm is maybe the most um known example internationally for like having these policies, but also similar to Copenhagen and Copenhagen's finger plan.
Speaker: So we we built the city around ah the subway lines and expanding the city into areas that were not built and building suburbs actually to get people a place to live because they hadn't.
Speaker: ah Oslo's land use strategy is kind of building on this environment, on this city. And we are saying, and been saying for a long time, that we are identifying the city from the inward and outwards and along the subway lines.
Speaker: and also some degree train lines. And this strategy makes it possible for people to choose public transport and make that easy. So it's like a political vision for Oslo that public transport, walking and biking should be the easiest choices for people in their everyday life.
Speaker: And both having the subway and densifying around the subway hubs and in the inner city, and also trying to build local places walkable ah is a very, very important part of that. And it's like the ground brick for how we work with that.
Speaker: This is transit-oriented development. A smart name for a simple idea. Build in places where public transport already exists and make public transport the easy choice.
Speaker: Oslo's Nordic neighbours Stockholm did it. So did Copenhagen, with their so-called finger plan, growing out along five routes from the palm of the city centre. Yanis Armefdis, an architect by trade, is applying similar-looking long-term thinking in Limassol.
Speaker: Changing dependency on cars won't only be about adding more buses, but rethinking the shape of the city itself. We have in the urban sprawl, actually, we have cities 30 kilometers with a density less than 3,000 people per square kilometer. That not helps the mobility. So we want to increase the density of the city.
Speaker: of course to be greener, but actually order to have long distance is not helping. We want to to cover especially the short distances with start walking or cycling or use, let's say, local transport buses, let's say small buses.
Speaker: ah want to change ah the urbanism and these qualities for airplane designing of Limassol. Actually, with these green corridors, if it will be shorter distances, ah you can go and support the local smaller shops so that you help the local economy, it will be more sustainable. And these g green routes and these public public areas actually is a it a place that people can meet. So it has this social impact of the city.
Speaker: So if you have all these opportunities with ah ah the public space, and with the green routes, so that's why will have this kind of the transformation. and And this is what we want to change.
Speaker: Limisol's green routes are two planned corridors of 20 kilometres with bike lanes and walking paths connecting various neighbourhoods. 25 new neighbourhood parks are also planned, along with 10,000 new trees and spaces for rest and shade, which Yanis Armefdis says should give every resident a park or a green area within walking distance.
Speaker: A quick detour. If you're enjoying the podcast, head over to the show notes down below in this podcast or on our website for more stories of inspiration and innovation from Mission Cities.
Speaker: Or check out the climate plans of Limassol or Oslo, which are also in the description. Now, back to the episode. Mission cities across the board know that you can't separate how a city moves from how the city actually lives.
Speaker: More green space and bike lanes, local shops within walking distance instead of out-of-town retail parks. These can be encouraged within transport policies, though at the heart, they are social policies.
Speaker: But our guests are honest in acknowledging that choices bring disagreement. Even change that people broadly want will create friction. Smoothing that friction is one of the hardest parts of the job.
Speaker: Change is not, let's say, easy. We believe it's normal that there is, let's say, we face a resistance and skepticism a lot of times because many people support the idea of the sustainable mobility. But when it changes affect our personal life and personal agenda, affect their parking, with the daily routines and traffic panels, concerts, natural lives.
Speaker: So in Limassol, we faced now and a half year that we are in the SMA or Limassol. and There are many discussions regarding mobility and the need for more roads and for more parking. But if we design a city for roads and for cars, we will have cars.
Speaker: so that it will be changed. Our approach had address these concerns, we want clear and direct communication with people, transparency, a continuous dialogue.
Speaker: If we design a city for cars, we will have cars. It's an idea that gets to the heart of why encouraging other means of transportation is so hard. If infrastructure shapes behavior, changing the infrastructure means changing what people have built their lives around.
Speaker: This friction is recognizable too in Oslo. There's a lot of parking spaces that have been moved. Some of them because of this livability city, central city project. like Some of them has been removed because we have expanded our bike network.
Speaker: I think we are have been working a lot of biking, but we're not comparable to like cities like Amsterdam and and Copenhagen at all. And some of them have been removed to enhance possibilities for public transport so they don't get stuck because of parked cars.
Speaker: and But all these changes, they often create tensions and discussions. um There have been a lot of examples on that in Oslo, both for people that uses their parking space can get upset. And there are a lot of discussions about that. But also there has been a lot of discussion about...
Speaker: Being able to do deliveries in the city, being able to work there. If you're a plumber or electrician, you kind of need your car as a part of how you're working.
Speaker: Interest organizations that are dependent on working on a van. They have been very skeptical and there has been projects where they have been counting places and there's a like a different understanding or reality of these problems because they say they don't have a place to park or set the car a car and then municipality will go out and look and they they will kind of count and find empty spaces.
Speaker: So it has been a lot of discussions about this and um a lot of work trying to figure out how to handle it. But that's definitely been an issue. And correspondingly, there's been an issue or a discussion about parking spaces for disabled people when parking spaces are removed. And that's has also been tried to follow up, tried to meet these challenges.
Speaker: keeping parking spaces for people in wheelchairs or and disabilities. So there has been tensions to lot of these projects and discussions. um And also, um especially when they started it, there was a lot of worries about how that would like affect trade the inner city. um That was kind of investigated in forefront, doing on an investigation into other cities that helaka had similar projects.
Speaker: But I think... They're like the organization representing the businesses in the inner city. They've been much more positive when this has has been ruled through because it's it makes also that makes the city a lot nicer ah for people.
Speaker: getting people out of the cars for short trips doesn't always mean putting them in a bus. A part of the shift in Oslo has been towards micro-mobility, like bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters. And although the expansion of its bike network has been contested, it has also created new patterns of movement that weren't there before.
Speaker: Okay, we've heard now what cities want to change, but how do they pay for it? And how do they maintain that political support for the results that could take years and many election cycles? For Limassol, the EU cities mission offers an important framework for cities to think and plan at scale and across time, which crucially will give them the credibility with the investors they need to realize their projects.
Speaker: Of course, this transformation that we want to do in Limassol requires ah cooperation, strategic planning, and as you said, the long-term governance.
Speaker: Mobility is not ah threaded as a stand-alone transport topic. It's a part of a broader a climate natural urban strategy. That's why want to focus on strong relation with departments, governmental departments, and close coordination or with these national authorities.
Speaker: And we also align with our local mobility actions according to with European policy directions because our challenges are shared across many cities, not only Limassol. The problem, many cities face the same problem.
Speaker: At the other side of years of actions to improve city transport, Oslo can point to the benefits of long-term commitment. Opponents to policies like road tolls, which generates value that goes back into the public transport and cycling, have been in the majority and at the minority over the last few decades.
Speaker: But positive results can have an effect. I think all these measures, they really go into people's life. um um Mobility is you know something that goes into everyone's everyday life, so which means that it's very much debated.
Speaker: Everything changes that you do. Some people will feel that they lose or that they get a fewer possibilities. This is also something we see in the statistics when we ask people. about different kinds of measure, you will see that people are divided on these measures.
Speaker: But do you also see that people change behavior or change understanding of measures when they see how they actually are in their real life.
Speaker: Common to both Oslo and Limassol, two distant cities with very different environments and histories, there is a clear problem standing between them and their climate goals.
Speaker: The choice of a more livable city, the green space and shade and amenities that are easy to reach by foot, bike or public transportation, is made at the expense of things that aren't chosen.
Speaker: In cities where space is scarce and there is a will to reduce noise and air pollution, fewer roads and less parking will be the cost of more parks and trees and more bikes or bus lanes.
Speaker: As we've heard, there will be friction. But over time, the benefits can compound and this can change minds.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to Path to Zero City Stories, a podcast series exploring how cities across Europe are working toward climate neutrality every day. You'll find other episodes in this series on our website at netzerocities.eu or on your favorite platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. If you like this podcast, please consider leaving a review or why not share with a colleague or a friend who's interested in local climate action. This episode was produced and scripted by Alan McKenzie, edited and designed by Anne Charlotte Costabatti, and I'm your host, Sean Urie. Until next time.
