The M4/A4 road that links Heathrow to central London, you discover, is one long traffic jam. After years of neglect, construction delays are growing ever more frequent; at one point–an overpass that’s said to be London’s busiest stretch of road–the highway suddenly narrows from six lanes to four. People use cell phones to turn their cars into mobile offices, Bangkok style. ““Look at some of the main thoroughfares in London, and you can see the future,’’ says Neil Kinnock, transport commissioner for the European Union. ““And it isn’t moving.''
London’s problems aren’t unique. Throughout the Continent, the costs of congestion and pollution have forced city and national governments to rethink their transportation policies–and have energized a new generation of environmentalists. Paris now often has higher ozone levels than Los Angeles. For a week last year central Rome was closed to all but emergency traffic because of dirty air. Even Oslo (population: 485,000) is suffering. Air quality is bad enough for regular wintertime warnings against allowing kids to play outdoors. Madrid (population: 3.2 million), where the authorities are investing in a third beltway and a $900 million extension to the subway system, expects to see 500,000 more cars on its roads within the next 10 years. The European Commission calculates that at any time there are traffic jams stretching 25,000 miles on the European Union’s roads–a problem that will worsen as car ownership surges in booming Eastern Europe.
Why are Europe’s capitals in such a mess? Blame history. The car is a latecomer to cities that developed in the horse-and-cart era. The highway ends at the suburbs; then it’s a crawl into a city center with narrow streets and a haphazard layout that can date from medieval times. (That’s why German cities have been spared the very worst congestion; flattened in World War II, they were often rebuilt with broad boulevards that–sometimes–allow cars to flow freely.) After World War II Europeans moved out of town–and soon brought traffic jams with them. Increased reliance on the car led to reduced income for public-transport systems, which were closed or run-down–just when congestion started to make commuters think they might try the bus or train. ““When people go looking for public transport,’’ says Kinnock, ““it’s not there.''
One favorite solution this year is a throwback–the streetcar. Subways, according to the latest wisdom, were a mistake: too expensive and too inflexible. (You can’t easily put a new stop on an old line when demand changes.) Streetcars, with their own road space, keep good time. The proof is Zurich, where streetcars glide through the heart of the city and along the lakeside highways with clockwork regularity. On-board computers tell drivers exactly where they should be at any time. And the streetcars are packed–not just with the poor but with bankers and style-conscious women. New streetcar lines are planned in a score of cities, including London, Dublin, Stockholm and Bordeaux.
Pedal power is nearly as trendy. In Paris cycleways now line most of the major boulevards; the authorities laid out 30 miles in 1996 and will match that total this year. Pancake-flat Holland has always encouraged the use of the bike, while in Copenhagen, a third of all commuters, including Denmark’s finance minister, travel to work on two wheels. In 1995 the city introduced a thousand ““City Bikes,’’ tethered at stands around the streets and available for a 20-kroner ($3.25) deposit. Need a bike for an hour or so? Just put your money in the slot, release the lock and ride away. Return it to any other stand and get your money back. Still, biking isn’t for everyone–or everywhere. You need to be fit to pedal from the West End to the hills of North London; you need to be mad to brave the Roman traffic on a bike. Amsterdam abandoned its own City Bike scheme after thieves moved in and stole the free bikes. And while it’s easy enough to run a streetcar line on a broad French or Belgian boulevard, it’s near impossible on the narrow streets of central London. Efficiency and cheapness won’t always be enough to charm commuters onto public transport. The Paris MEtro is famously strike-prone.
So maybe the answer is cruder: just ban the car. Sizable chunks of Rome, Naples and Milan are now closed to motor traffic altogether–or open only to residents and delivery vehicles, a tactic already common in many smaller towns. Plans are under consideration in London to seal off Trafalgar Square and part of the Strand. Too harsh? Paris is establishing a patchwork of ““Quiet Quarters’’ where car entry is restricted, maximum speeds are cut to barely 20 mph and some roads are sealed off altogether. Though some traders will moan, such zones can work; London’s Covent Garden was closed to traffic in the early 1980s and is now one the city’s biggest tourist draws. British planners often impose fierce limits on the number of parking spaces allowed for any office development. In Rome, where freedom to park at will has been considered a birthright, this year saw the appearance of the city’s first pay-and-display meters.
These solutions could spawn new problems. Limiting parking and banning cars in city centers can sometimes just shove congestion to the suburbs. And restrictions just invite lawbreaking, especially, planners quietly say, in the Latin south, where attachment to cars is passionate. Many Roman drivers happily pay an occasional fine rather than give up their cars. And the rich can always find a way around irksome laws. On days when the air is really bad, Athens tries to reduce traffic by barring cars with odd–or even–numbers on alternate days. Prosperous residents just keep two vehicles.
The planners are fighting not just custom but emotion. Europeans love their cars, with good reason. For a vast range of journeys, it’s the cheapest, most flexible and pleasant form of getting around. Even in the plushest streetcar the commuter shares space with a few dozen straphangers–bearable if they are nice, polite Swiss, not if they are Londoners heading home after a night’s clubbing. Dutch cities offer free subway tickets to motorists who use car parks on the cities’ edges, but the parks are still stubbornly half empty. Yvonne Pepper drives an hour to her job in a downtown Amsterdam bookstore, and admits: ““I love the traffic jam. There’s happy music on the radio, and I use the time to take care of my makeup and browse a bit in the morning paper.’’ Paul Everitt of the British Road Federation, an industry lobby, concedes that more roads in the inner city do little good. And yet, he points out, ““transport is the great facilitator of the modern industrial society. Ultimately you have got to decide if you want to live in a growing economy.''
It’s easy to guess the answer from the new breed of environmentalists in Britain: no, we don’t. The simple solution to Europe’s traffic problems, they think, is just to stop building new roads. This year’s most unlikely British folk hero has been Daniel Hooper, an unemployed, deeply grungy 23-year-old better known as Swampy. Hooper first came to prominence last January, when police tried to close Fairmile Camp, the last redoubt of a 2i-year protest against a new road to the West Country. Some protesters had built ““twigloos’’ high in the trees; others had dug a network of deep burrows underground. Last to emerge from the tunnels, after a standoff with police and bailiffs lasting nearly a week, was Swampy–who would soon model Armani on the front page of a tabloid. The protests worked; some polls consistently show a majority of Britons support the anti-road protesters, if not their tactics. Earlier this year, in the medieval squalor of an anti-road encampment on a Devon hillside, activist Banana Tom mused on posterity: ““In the end,’’ he said, ““history is going to say they were the bad guys, not us.’’ Spend an unhappy hour with an unhappy cabbie on the road from Heathrow, and you just might agree.
Europe’s love affair with the automobile rivals eveb America’s.
Country Number of Cars* Italy 532 United States 514 Germany 489 France 430 Belgium 417 Netherlands 382 Norway 380 Britain 372 Portugal 357 Spain 343 Denmark 310
*Per 1,000 people. Source 1996 transport statistics Great Britain.
