Last Sunday was good for a cycle in Brussels. Apart from the odd bus or taxi there was little risk of being clipped by a speeding motorist, as for one day private cars were banned from roads across the city.
Kids, their parents and everyone else was able to take the bike out and pedal along in the middle of the road. People out for a jog swapped the hazardous cobblestones that make up many footpaths for the smooth road. Others simply enjoyed the novelty of leisurely ambling along.
Not interested in getting the bicycles out, one trio had taken horses for a trot through central Brussels. Public transport was free for the duration of the “car-free” day, which happens once a year in the Belgian capital.
In the Chatelain neighbourhood, several roads had been fully closed off and turned into a large “brocante”, or jumble sale, where people set up stalls to sell second-hand clothes, vinyl records and other bits.
On another small square in the Ixelles commune a picnic had been organised by the municipal authority, where people were sitting on long benches and chatting. “It’s a moment where everything is free and people can come, they can bring some food, they share the food and they speak together,” says Nathalie Durant, one of the organisers.
Speaking while cleaning forks and knives, Durant says the local picnic was always organised to coincide with the car-free day. “Here we want the people to reappropriate the space and in the street it is exactly the same,” she says. Nearby a child on a little blue scooter is having great fun flying down a particularly steep road again and again, as his mother watches on.
Tom Moylan, who runs Restless Brussels, an organisation that tries to get the international community in the city more involved in local politics and civic society, says the day was always a big success. “Once people experience it, it’s something they look forward to,” he says. “I think there is very broad support for car-free day ... Nobody is proposing that this would be the way it is all the time,” he says.
The idea gives people a chance to imagine what the city might look like if less priority was given to cars, he says. As the father of a toddler, Moylan says his main concern is road safety, but the debate about taking back some public space from cars is wider than that. “Everybody always frames it as bikes versus cars. We’re talking about community spaces, the air we breathe, the sound,” he says.
Brussels has undergone a “profound transformation” in recent years, pedestrianising parts of the city centre and improving cycling infrastructure, he says. However, the debate about how to make the streets of the city less dominated by traffic has since become more polarised.
Some immigrant communities bristled at recent changes, as part of broader tensions arising from the gentrification of parts of north and west Brussels, he says. “Many of the frustrations associated with mobility changes are connected to other things,” Moylan says. He adds that those concerns need to be taken seriously as well.
Wiet Vandaele, who is the head of road safety campaign group Heroes for Zero, says it has been great to see the amount of children out on their bikes on Sunday, kids who otherwise might have been inside in front of a screen.
More generally, he says he is concerned about politicians trying to capitalise on the backlash against longer-term traffic changes to win votes. “Lots of local politicians still cling to this idea that you have to be able to drive at high speed until you get to your underground office car park,” he says.
Brussels has a history of “car-centric design”, but improvements have been made in recent years. “As long as there is cyclists and people on scooters being killed we are not there yet,” he says. Plans for “low traffic neighbourhoods” met with local resistance, which Vandaele says has not been helped by politicians “stoking up the fire”.
Dublin’s version of “car-free day” during European Mobility Week looked somewhat different last weekend. The ambition of Dublin City Council amounted to closing off Custom House Quay to traffic between 11am and 4pm on Sunday.
Moylan, who grew up in Dublin but has lived in Brussels for the last 10 years, says there is no reason the Irish capital city could not go car-free for one day of the year. “It’s a question of will,” he says.