
Pontevedra, Spain’s Happy Little Carless City - imartin2k
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/spains-happy-little-carless-city/
======
ardit33
Having traveled/lived a lot in Europe I have noticed that totally car-less
city is something that actually is not necessary good, but 'limiting car
travel' is.

Car based transportation is still needed for:

1\. Shipping of goods/deliveries, etc....

2\. Shipping of people (think elderly, sick, disabled, ambulances, taxis,
etc..)

Best way to do this with blocks/chunks of the cities being pedestrian only,
and roads with loading/unloading areas that come close enough.... but no
parking, or maybe parking centralized underground in one place, with one clear
entry exit (so people don't circle around to find parking).

Best solution I have seen is in Barcelona, where you have blocks cordoned off,
and pedestrian only use, and still have streets that get close enough to these
blocks... so you can do your deliveries as well....

Karlsruhe and Ulm in Germany do achieve this as well . (major areas are
pedestrian only, allow cars to come close for loading/unloading, limited on-
street parking, and parking in the center only allowed in some major
underground place).

Most people can reach the center, if they really have to, but it discourages
daily use of the car as it would be too expensive to park.

~~~
aclsid
Call me the evil polluter, but I'm sorry I still find cars one of the best
inventions humankind has come up with, and it could be a horse and a carriage
for all I care. But the freedom of having your own horse/car won't be replaced
with stuff like this imho.

If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small
enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements
(rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.

~~~
tjr225
Nobody is questioning the convenience of cars.

However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or
a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a
simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be
doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.

Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport
distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were
far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.

I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to
Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to
Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently
work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I
occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me,
life is better the less car you can involve in it.

I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still,
I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing
to not depend on it.

~~~
cortesoft
I lived a no car life, where I walked to work, the store, everywhere. I have
also lived the drive a long distance life.

My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short
drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample
parking.

Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It
sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to
walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.

A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.

~~~
so33
> A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking

And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs
surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with
traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.

You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can
have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts
(Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this
scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered
around cities for literally millennia.

Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery
stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical
ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use
in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone
can have the light traffic car commute.

You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop
micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from
the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating
the political will for good public transit.

~~~
aclsid
I live in a place where that is actually a thing, and let me tell you what
happens then is that a new coffee shop opens and suddenly a two-lane road
becomes a one-lane road. So too much freedom in that sense also hurts.

Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area,
Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your
car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best
tradeoff without having to do something radical.

------
jlg23
Without regard to the actual topic there is a gem of wisdom that applies to a
lot of hackers in "projects from hell": if you want to change something big
way, do it in incremental steps, do what is within reach (in reach for the
most stubborn/narrow minded opponent).

Just because you figured it all out don't expect others to listen to you
lecture them.

A small step, easily digestible, that turns out to be useful, is much more
useful than long rants: a) the actual goal is one step closer, b) people will
start to really think about what you say once you delivered, c) you might
learn you are wrong

------
pvaldes
It rains each three minutes, the sea is deep and wild and the water is cold as
death. People talk in high pitch tones, are easy going and friendly by default
with (civilised) visitors but also complex inside and sometimes release their
sadness or little inner martian also. Is all by the weather

So is basically like the planet Kamino (de Santiago) but with really memorable
food. I love it :-)

Here is the official unofficial anthem that explains everything about this
crazy people:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t02dFZI7nw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t02dFZI7nw4)

~~~
icebraining
I spent a lot of my youth there, yet didn't know Siniestro! Thanks for that!

Galicia is a great region, you feel like you're living both in the past and in
the present at once, without discordance.

~~~
candeira
I grew up in Galicia, my sister still works for child services there. I'll
give you some of the cheer and awe, but will dispute the lack of discordance.

------
jpster
This is such a cool publication, by the way. Founded by David Byrne of Talking
Heads.

------
maelito
I'd love to see a ranking by country of the most carless cities.

~~~
lqet
Based on [0], but it seems to be extremely ill-defined what a "car-free place"
is. For example, in the United States, something like a single car-free street
seems to fit this definition, whereas in Europe, you will find pedestrian
streets basically in every town or village, but only the places where for
example the entire city center / old town is carless appear in the article. I
also tried to do a little manual disambiguation:

    
    
      US 59
      Germany 36
      France 31
      Austria 28
      Switzerland 26
      UK 17
      Spain 17
      Australia 16
      Canada 11
      Bulgaria 11
      Italy 10
      Portugal 9
      Argentina 9
      Poland 8
      Netherlands 8
      Morocco 8
      Mexico 7
      Belgium 7
      Greece 6
      Croatia 6
      China 6
      Sweden 5
      Romania 5
      Japan 5
      Israel 5
      Ukraine 4
      Turkey 4
      Russia 4
      India 4
      Brazil 4
      Serbia 3
      Denmark 3
      Nicaragua 2
      Lithuania 2
      Lebanon 2
      Finland 2
      Vietnam 1
      Urugay 1
      UAE 1
      Thailand 1
      Nepal 1
      Montenegro 1
      Malaysia 1
      Lybia 1
      Latvia 1
      Kenya 1
      Kazakhstan 1
      Indonesia 1
      Hungary 1
      Estonia 1
      Cuba 1
      Colombia 1
      Chile 1
      Sierra Leone 1
      New Zealand 1
      Czech Republic 3
      Costa Rica 2
      Burkina Faso 1
      Bosnia and Herzegovina 1
    

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-
free_places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places)

~~~
wetpaws
US having a first place looks strange given how car-centric it's culture is.

~~~
vinay427
One thing I was thinking of are university campuses, which tend to be more
often be localized (not spread among a larger city) in the US. I'm sure there
are some in European countries but I haven't seen it yet and I'm a student
here. In most of these types of campuses that I've been to in the US, the main
streets within the campus are therefore closed to non-essential car traffic.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
You know what very famous city is completely car-free? Venice.

That's no joke. Venice has canals and all the vehicle traffic is restricted to
the canals, but, well, that's exactly it. Vehicle traffic and pedestrian
traffic never have to cross each other's path, in fact they physically can't
[1]. There are large areas, especially in the interior of the main island,
that are naturally only for pedestrians, areas where only small canals reach
that are not accessible by motorboat, areas where you don't hear a vehicle for
hours on end.

And just to answer the concerns of people who wonder how commerce would
continue if delivery trucks are not allowed to enter a pedestrianised city-
Venice is a huge commercial zone where everyone sells everything to everyone
else. Free trade doesn't need cars, people.

________________

[1] Unless a pedestrian falls into a canal; or someone like Ottobre Nero, an
infamous gondoliero, manages to get their vessel on land which is not
impossible with a bit of motivation.

------
andion
I'm from a town nearby Pontevedra. I lived in the city, and outside. I really
like carless cities, and move almost everywhere by bike where I live now
(Coruña).

Pontevedra is great, and I really like how the city center feels, it got super
friendly to walk by foot. But every time I see news like this I get a little
angry because they don't talk about the real experience of commuting to the
city or its crazy development.

Regarding development: The city has very few parks inside it compared to other
Spanish cities. Mainly because they don't save spaces for them, the ones that
exist have 30+ years. Building development is crazy, you can build virtually
everywhere. You can see new buildings leaving very narrow alleys (example in
[1]), tons of new buildings with no single "green zone" nearby (example in [2]
where the only planned "park" is the little one by the roundabout)

Regarding commuting: Doing so from the multiple towns around is not easy and
got way worse. . Many kids go to study to Pontevedra from 20+ km around. The
road from my parent's house from my mothers job has 40 road bumpers in total.
She does 4 trips a day counting 160 bumps a day. It gets old quick. The
"deterrent parkings" are poorly located to avoid crossing the city and the
main one we can use looks like a swamp when it rains, as you can see here:
[https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA](https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA)

I just want to put our two cents on a different side on the story, I wish they
implemented some more policies for outsiders that work / use city services. I
hope more people get the whole picture from this.

[1]
[https://goo.gl/maps/LTDxgPevfgTyidybA](https://goo.gl/maps/LTDxgPevfgTyidybA)
[2]
[https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4267082,-8.634709,761a,35y,2...](https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4267082,-8.634709,761a,35y,223.04h,8.02t/data=!3m1!1e3)

------
WaxProlix
There's an intentionally old-timey place in Michigan called Macinac Island
(pronounced mackinaw), which has been automobile-less since I can remember.
Fun place to go for a bit, get some fudge, go for some nature walks, get a
horse drawn carriage ride, etc. Haven't been since I was a kid, so it's hard
to say how the experience holds up.

Likely a much, much lower population density than any of these current urban
experiments, but I still think of it every time I see the "no cars" thing
being done.

[http://www.mackinac.com/about/history/no-
cars](http://www.mackinac.com/about/history/no-cars)

~~~
codemac
> automobile-less since I can remember

Sept 2019: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/mackinac-pence-
motorca...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/mackinac-pence-
motorcade.html)

~~~
WaxProlix
For some reason, this feels like a real tragedy.

------
AmpsterMan
I was lived in Spain for some time not too long ago. Wife and I visited
Pontevedra and we fell in love. I wish there were some way for me to get a
good remote job and live there.

~~~
eloycoto
I'm working remote from a near village, and it's soo awesome!

~~~
andion
Which one? I'm from Moraña myself

------
keyle
The article makes it sounds all positive, but I'd love to hear from a local
that's been through the transition. Surely the local businesses cannot be all
positive about this.

I mean, a car comes with a trunk, where you can put your shopping in. Having
to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.

~~~
iagovar
I'm not from Pontevedra, but close, and I know some locals and I've been
there.

Complains that I remember.

\- People from outside the city has problems to move apparently. They say that
there aren't parkings enough in the city borders, so they have to go for one
that's roughly in the center, through very slow traffic lines. That induces
them to go less frequently.

\- Businesses like bars, chocolate shops and so on flourished (leisure
oriented), but others like hardware stores, furniture stores, two law firms,
and a Cinema closed.

Imagine that you were going to the hardware store. It's either impossible to
park near it
[https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4264585,-8.6406022,3a,41.3y,1...](https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4264585,-8.6406022,3a,41.3y,155.93h,73.72t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sErTMUAEThDDMOuUgJ_n7sA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en)
or difficult/forbidden/very slow traffic
[https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4304871,-8.6417988,3a,42.3y,1...](https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4304871,-8.6417988,3a,42.3y,10.95h,73.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sM6O8EdLQUe3zkXm8ocZvIg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en)

~~~
andion
Exactly the commuting problem from my comment. Thanks!

------
m463
One fact I noticed traveling through europe, the small quaint cities that
couldn't accomodate cars well... were designed and built for pedestrians and
horses in the first place.

------
diziet
Relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-
free_places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places)

~~~
dzhiurgis
This is terrible. I read the article and thought “wow this would really work
for Vilnius”. Something I’ve thought for last year matter of fact. Initially
ai thought some car traffic could be replaced with e-scooters, but cobbled
roads wouldn’t work well for it. Turns out Vilnius (old town I presume) is
already “””car free”””. In reality there’s about 3-5 streets that mostly take
tourists and locals around. There are no good reason to keep them open. I
really hope one day this changes. It would make city so much quieter and
nicer.

------
simonebrunozzi
Interesting to read this one, as just last night I was having dinner with a
friend and discussed the topic of car-free cities, driverless cars, etc, for
about 2 hours.

It is such an interesting topic, and there's so much assumptions that we
always take for granted that prevent us from having a smart conversation about
it. And then, of course, there's regulation, which essentially kills any idea
almost instantly.

An example? In the US you need to have a rear mirror in a car. A driverless
car doesn't need one... But without the mirror, it can't pass the test to make
it compliant and allow it to be on the road.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
Makes sense, driverless cars can still be driven manually right now. So it
needs a read mirror.

------
viburnum
Jane Jacobs has this all figured out in 1960!

------
bernawil
>many streets are designed as loops, making it impossible to use them to drive
from one end of the city to the other. This solved a major problem—before the
redesign, some streets were choked with nearly 30,000 cars a day, most of them
simply passing through. Now, Lores told Citiscope, “If you enter by the south,
you leave by the south.”

They got away with transient traffic and are now generating their traffic in
adjacent communities. Smart.

~~~
ihaveajob
What's the point of driving to X if you know you can't get to X by car? The
'adjacent community' traffic surplus idea is bogus. At most you'll generate
some short term need for added parking space in adjacent regions.

~~~
dashscript
I think you misunderstood it. Take a look at the map and you'll see pontevedra
is tiny, a circle barely 2km wide. Car owners obviously don't work there but
commute somewhere else (most probably Vigo in the south). Story goes, their
roads where clogged with passing traffic, commuters passing by pontevedra
going somewhere else. Then pontevedra got rid of all roads and made a big ring
road around the city. So they turned their city into a proverbial cul de sac
to escape from other people's traffic. If every other community in the way did
the same around them guess what.

~~~
Merrill
The old city center is a warren of narrow streets and must have been hell to
navigate. Seems that it was a dying city center slum and this was a key step
in gentrifying it.

------
Scapeghost
There has been an suspiciously steady spate of anti-car posts on HN in the
past month.

~~~
gerardnll
Because use of private transport has to decrease. It is neither sustainable
nor healthy. Even if it's a Tesla.

------
TylerE
How many of these posts do we need a day? They have long ceased to be "news"
or interesting. The only real variation here is that it isn't citylab.

~~~
journalctl
And how many of these responses do we need on each one of these posts? I find
it fascinating that articles talking about the benefits of car-free places
make some people so viscerally upset. Why does this strike a nerve so much?

------
lazyjones
Typical disingenuous car-hater article.

They show a b/w picture from the 1970's to demonstrate the "before" situation
with passthrough traffic ([https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10...](https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/Pontevedra4.png)). If you look at maps, you will see
that since then the AP-9 highway
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9))
has been built around the city. So that situation was clearly resolved
otherwise. It has nothing to do with the current Mayor's expensive actions to
make the city more easily overrun by tourists.

