Cities captured by cars: Part 1 of ‘And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile’
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Transportation, Cars, Cities, Urbanism, Urban Planning

Except that in 1958, city planners decided that precisely what this pleasing knot of green streets and ochre houses needed was a six-lane freeway running through the middle of it, replacing the existing tram connection to the city and slicing the subtle designs of the neighbourhood in two, severing the organic flow of streets and squares.

Note this aerial view of State Road 73 through Enskede, Stockholm, over which I’ve sketched an example sliced diagonal connection towards the bottom, and the cut laterals in the middle and top. The road has large plastic noise barriers lining it, though pedestrian underpasses maintain some of these connections—but imagine instead walking across a thinner tree-lined boulevard, flanked by gardens, with regular trams to the city, and numerous entry points. That’s what it was.

The huge concrete hardscape increases the need for stormwater and snow management, and exacerbates wind tunnel and heat island effects in other weather. Either way, it massively reduces biodiversity. The road’s traffic cloaks the nearby streets in a fug of dirtier air than is necessary, and subjects the entire district in a constant, pervasive thrum of traffic noise, unavoidable other than through staying indoors and closing the (admittedly well-insulated) windows. Despite the pedestrian underpasses being reasonable enough, as they go, it unnecessarily separates communities too, of course. Before State Road 73, the walk from our house towards the Blåsut subway stop would’ve been over tree-lined avenues with intermittent trams. Now it is over a concrete bridge, actually part of a roundabout for vehicles. I’ve taken noise readings on that bridge, the only link between our house and the subway station, and it averages around a constant 75–80db, which is short of the official measure of ‘harmful’ at 85db, but is apparently somewhat like living inside a vacuum cleaner.

Here are two videos of State Road 73 at the ‘slices’ indicated in the photo above, large barriers damping things a little, but essentially creating a noisy, dirty obstacle to what was once a place. The first is at the sliced diagonal connection indicated above, now flowing directly into a plastic wall with six lanes of fast moving traffic behind. The second indicates the pedestrian underpass, which gets you under the scars left by the surgery carried out to the ‘natural’ ground plane:

More problematically for the wider city, all that extra traffic, generated by State Road 73, is dumped all over Stockholm. For we know, unequivocally, after decades of data, that roads generate traffic, rather than ease it.

Over the next few decades, State Road 73 was expanded south for 57 kilometres, locking in a pattern of mobility completely at odds with that of Gamla Enskede, or indeed the compact, walkable Södermalm it connected to at one end, and the small towns, villages and farms at the other.

This move was repeated across the country, from the heart of our cities to the countryside. In the great Swedish architecture book ‘X1960: Tio byggnader som definerade 1960-talet’ (or, ‘X1960: Ten Buildings that defined the 1960s’), we can see how this ‘Bo med bil’ (‘live with the car’) lifestyle was implicit in the 1950s/60s rebuilding of Swedish society, with Sweden the most car-dense country in Europe by 1955.