This Spanish city has been restricting cars for 24 years. Here’s what we can learn from it

Pontevedra, Spain, offers some of the best evidence available about what happens when a city is reconfigured to accommodate people, rather than cars.

In 1999, Miguel Anxo Fernandez Lores became mayor of Pontevedra, a city of 84,000 in northwestern Spain. At the time, Pontevedra was grappling with a bevy of challenges including poor air quality, an exodus of young families, and a sputtering local economy. Inspired by books like Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the British report Traffic in Towns, Fernandez Lores believed he had a solution: Get rid of the cars that were clogging Pontevedra’s streets.

Read Full Story