Car-free cities: how to reorganize urban mobility ?

Abstract

The urgent need to address climate change forces researchers to explore various solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of mobility and transport. Research in this area mainly focuses on electric vehicles and on the increase of public transport modal share. However, to our knowledge the study of car-free cities remains very superficial yet. In this paper, we propose to simulate urban trips under different scenarios of private car prevalence. The objective is to evaluate the impacts of car suppression on transport, in particular in terms of modal share and travel time. Our results show that for the city of Lyon, most users would not see any travel time increase if private cars were suppressed. The metro and tramway networks would need minimal adaptation, whereas the bus network would need more significant improvements.