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Why Belgium does it better (part 1)
0 Comments | Posted by Ben in Europe, activism, events, other cities, road closures
This will be part one of my two-part post on why Belgium does it better. As a quick backgrounder, I’m spending 5 months in Brussels on exchange from my studies at the University of Ottawa. This post is about Car Free Day, and really it’s not just Belgium that does this better, it’s most of Europe.
While in Canada, Car Free Day amounts to little more than an appeal to voluntarily use another method of transportation or the closing of a few blocks for a form of street fair, in Brussels, they shut down the entire urban centre, amounting to 160 km2. Granted, this was done on a Sunday, so they weren’t quite willing to impede regular commuting traffic. However, in a city of over 1 million residents, with an ordinarily crowded, bustling centre (to a degree that isn’t even comparable to Ottawa), this was still a very big undertaking.
The effect was nothing short of dramatic. Immediately below, I’ve got a split-screen photo of General Jacques, a major commuting road near my apartment. On the left is a photo of General Jacques that I took yesterday afternoon at about 4pm, at the beginning of the commuter rush. On the right is a photo of the street on Car Free Day.
Car Free Day in Brussels was incredible no because of what there was, but because of what there wasn’t: unpleasant smells, offensive noises and a general feeling of unease from the overwhelming domination of cars in our cities. This last one I don’t even notice on a day to day basis, but it’s absence was palpable. For that matter, I don’t notice many of the effects of cars on a given day of walking around the city, but when they were gone, there was an almost eerie calm, despite the fact that you were surrounded by dozens or hundreds of people.
Simply put, Brussels without cars was a much nicer, healthier and safer place to be. Experiencing that was both inspiring and depressing, a sentiment which I’m sure I was sharing with thousands of other people in the city that day.
I’ll finish this post simply by showing a few more photos of the city. All of the photos below were taken on major streets in Brussels, which are usually crowded with cars.
