Key takeaways:
- A community concern of “tactical urbanism” - low-cost, temporary changes to streets and roadways to increase safety, especially for people walking and biking – is that such changes increase traffic congestion and negatively impact local businesses. The findings of this case study indicate otherwise and that rather than increasing traffic, tactical urbanism contributes to “traffic evaporation” – a decrease in traffic flow following a decrease in road space.
- The study measured the relative changes in traffic following the implementation of multiple tactical urbanism interventions on eleven streets in Barcelona, Spain, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Four areas were studied: intervention streets (directly impacted by changes), adjacent streets (parallel to where changes took place), buffer streets (within 1/3 mile of where changes took place), and control streets (greater than 1/3 mile from where changes took place). Following the changes, traffic decreased significantly on the intervention streets, without a corresponding increase in the other three areas.
Implications:
- For practitioners, this article adds to the evidence that temporary changes made to roadways and streets – to make space for active transportation – do not create more traffic along alternate routes, as many opponents contend.
Nello-Deakin, S. Exploring traffic evaporation: Findings from tactical urbanism interventions in Barcelona. Case Studies on Transport Policy 10, (2022).
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