A Car-Lite Suburb
Vauban, Germany is an experimental suburban neighborhood in which street parking, driveways, and home garages are forbidden. In fact, Vauban is nearly car-free, with 70 percent of its 5,500 residents getting around solely by bicycle, foot, and transit. The suburb was designed with stores more evenly dispersed among homes than in a typical suburb, making for easy access on foot or bicycle. Vauban’s car-sharing club provides rentals for those times when someone has the need. A similar community called “Quarry Village” is currently in the works for Hayward, CA.
3 Responses to “A Car-Lite Suburb”
It’s a suburb of Freiburg, which itself is one of the world’s most “green” and bike-and-pedestrian-friendly cities to begin with — I suppose Vauban could be thought of as Freiburg 2.0.
Interesting that some of the people who moved to Vauban sold their cars in order to live there.
This place is cool, I need to find some developers in my area to try something like this! I’m selling my house as it is – maybe we should wait and try to build a car free “suburb”
The problems with zoning ordinances in the U.S. that govern most property development are not limited to car-centric thinking. Fire codes require huge separations between buildings and roads wide enough for fire-fighting apparatus maneuvering. Human scale takes a back seat to perceived public safety concerns so suburbia is spread out as far as possible. Re-thinking community design is ham-strung not only by reliance on individual automobile ownership but also by intractable, panphobic codes and ordinances.