It is easier to imagine the destruction of a city than a city without a car.

Dutch urbanism is known for the concept of autoluw, which can be roughly described as streets where the car is last in line. It is not about pedestrian zones, but streets where the order of priorities in public space, which we usually encounter (cars have the most space and everything else is subordinate to them), is completely reversed. Cars are only guests in a space that belongs to people on foot or bicycles. If all cities managed to reverse these priorities, we could deliver a serious blow to many of today’s social crises and challenges: from the epidemic of anxiety among young people to the climate crisis and the economic prosperity of cities.

There is one invention, one phenomenon, that lies at the intersection of what some call polycrisis – a set of crises, epidemics, and disasters that are hitting us all at once and are interconnected. The climate crisis, demographic crisis, imperial wars in Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon (with threats to others in Taiwan or Cuba), the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements worldwide, AI-driven distortion of truth on the internet, the epidemic of anxiety and mental illnesses, especially among youth and children, as well as a decline in physical fitness and an increase in obesity.

The invention is the personal car. Especially the car in our cities.

It may sound a bit far-fetched. However, if we had to choose one invention that triggered the most changes prior to today – in the words of the Minister of Culture – shitstorm, it is precisely the car. The automobile destroyed public space and turned places into noisy, dirty, stressful, and deadly networks of roads around which people try to live. It literally cemented our dependence on fossil fuels. It deprived children and young people of independence and the ability to exist in the world without adult assistance and control. And it robbed us all of natural physical movement, which we don’t even have to think about or plan.

How cities die – and can come back to life

When I left the Ministry of Finance to work at the Bratislava City Hall, colleagues gave me the iconic urban planning book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. The fundamental thesis of the book is that the automobile – and car-oriented urbanism – destroyed American cities. Jacobs describes narrowing sidewalks, from which playing children and adults disappear to give way to ever faster cars. Entire neighborhoods are demolished for new highways, often poorer areas or those inhabited by minorities. With people disappearing from public space, streets lose their natural safety in numbers. Cities become dangerous – partly due to larger and faster cars, but also because of fewer people on the streets. And cities lose their charm – their anonymity, density, and diversity, which provide freedom and refuge to everyone who comes to them. Stadtluft macht frei?

European cities may not look as apocalyptic as Houston, but automobile urbanism has not spared Europe either. Amsterdam and Copenhagen – today hubs of urban cycling and sustainability in general – narrowly escaped the American fate. Jokinen Plan and Finger Plan would, if implemented, have destroyed the centers of these cities in favor of urban highways. They were stopped only by the relative poverty of both cities and the oil crisis of the 1970s. Bratislava did not have such luck – and thus the SNP Bridge and Old Town Street were built. According to Jacobs, on wide and safe sidewalks, people of different classes, ages, and professions naturally meet. It is a space where children can spend time safely and where business relationships are also formed. This seemingly chaotic life is, for Jane Jacobs, the engine of cities and their prosperity. The automobile destroys all this.

Cities have always been dirty in various ways. Initially, they lacked sewage systems and heated with coal and wood. Later, sewage was solved, but factories and heating plants burning coal and releasing a multitude of toxic substances into the air stood in the middle of cities. Trains passing through also burned coal or diesel. However, all these trends have been improving since the second half of the 20th century. Natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal, railways have been electrified, and heating has gradually transitioned. Factories have been moved further from residential areas. Nuclear energy, water, and sustainable energy sources have begun to replace coal and gas. With one exception – cars continued to increase in number. If you associate noise and smell with “the city,” most of it is caused by cars. Electric cars won’t solve this either – beyond a certain speed, the primary source of noise is not the engine but the contact of tires with the road. And, apart from exhaust gases, electric cars also pollute cities – up to 2000 times more harmful particles are produced by tires than exhaust, especially in heavy vehicles like increasingly popular SUVs and electric cars with heavy batteries. Cars literally suffocate and kill cities, including through physical stress and even Parkinson’s disease, which can be caused by chronic noise.

Cars have taken away the natural source of movement – traveling for work, school, shopping, or other activities. Studies repeatedly confirm that living in cities or neighborhoods where it is safe to walk or bike is more active, people naturally have more activity and movement, lower obesity or diabetes rates. It is also the most equitable form of movement. “Movement inequality” is a phenomenon where the level of physical activity is not evenly distributed in society but depends on relative wealth and other socioeconomic factors. If a person has enough money and time, even in car-dominated cities and countries (the United States, Australia, and Canada are among the most movement-inequitable and most dependent on cars among Western countries), they can access sufficient movement. They can go to the gym, pay for a trainer, or live in an expensive city offering more transportation options. Removing cars from places helps equalize this inequality because it gives everyone the chance to move “for free.”

Automobile urbanism also creates a self-reinforcing vicious circle that deepens our dependence on cars and fossil fuels. Sparsely built suburbs – whether stereotypical Bratislava suburbs on Zitný Island or “modern” housing estates where the only public space is a parking lot – do not provide enough density to sustain quality public transport. Their distance from offices, schools, or shops also confirms that relying on bicycles or walking is impossible. They are also a financial burden on local governments, as they cannot generate enough tax revenue to sustain basic infrastructure or build alternatives to car transport (I recommend the book Strong Towns on this topic). As a result, people have no choice but to drive, which puts pressure on increasing capacity for car transport (often built by the state, which does not have as limited a budget as local governments – e.g., the R7 highway serving Bratislava’s suburbs on Zitný Island).

The epidemic of mental illnesses (anxiety, depression) among young people is mainly attributed by authors to social networks and phones (see Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt). However, Haidt’s book is more a collection of stories fitted to correlations that do not prove anything and distract from finding the real sources of the rise in mental health diagnoses. Similar to autism or homosexuality, it will be more about destigmatization, increased awareness of mental health, and better access to diagnostics. Part of the observed increase in diagnoses is likely real, so it is important to look for reasons behind this “psychiatric crisis.”

One of the key factors influencing children’s mental health and well-being is the feeling of freedom and independence. If you have children, you surely know the “I can do it myself” phase. A major source of independence is the ability to move independently in public space. The happiest children in OECD countries are in Denmark and the Netherlands – countries where children are also able to move independently, e.g., to school or playground, thanks to safe cycling infrastructure and active removal of cars from public space. But even in those countries where the level of children’s independent “mobility” is highest (like the Netherlands, Denmark, or Finland), this level decreases. According to the cited study, the automobile is intertwined with the relentless logic of capitalism. More extracurricular activities, selective and private schools outside one’s neighborhood, greater parental pressure and work commitments all force parents to act as taxi drivers for their children.

Capitalism on four wheels

The automobile is, in fact, a physical embodiment of capitalism. Few physical things so closely mirror the logic of market capitalism. Through its individualism, a personal car gives a person a false sense of freedom (I can go wherever I want, the car is mine). It creates the illusion that, unlike others who rely on state-subsidized services like trains, urban transit, or intercity buses, I earned my car with my own hands, and I pay for the fuel, maintenance, and inspections myself. It isolates the person from sharing physical space with other travelers because, unlike pedestrians or bus passengers, inside a car we are each separated by metal walls, moving at speeds where it’s impossible to perceive or initiate conversation with others.

And it isolates the person from the fact that, in reality, the car also benefits from high levels of state subsidy. All levels of public administration contribute to enabling people to travel by car everywhere. From highways and expressways managed by the NDS (investments financed almost entirely from EU funds and the state budget, despite tolls and highway stickers that are used only for operation and maintenance), through the national SSC that manages and builds first-class roads, to regions, cities, and municipalities responsible for second- and third-class roads, local streets, and parking lots. For 2025, the rough estimate is at least 1.6 billion euros according to the COFOG classification.

It’s also important to mention the hegemony that cars hold in standards and other legal and lower regulations. Parking standards require all builders, whether private developers or public institutions, to build large numbers of parking spaces – another subsidy, or in the case of private development, a tax that shifts resources from other purposes in favor of personal cars. In Western cities, there is a move towards parking maximums (to prevent too many parking spaces), but in our country, we still have minimum parking requirements. Changes in traffic signage or other interventions in urban street space must be approved by police, whose explicit goal is to maintain “traffic flow and safety” – which means exclusively and solely automobile traffic. Thus, calming streets, creating bike lanes, reducing speeds, etc., often face pre-judged assessments by the police.

That’s why removing cars from places is such a politically challenging task. New tram lines or railway stations, or parking policies (which are not “against” cars but favor domestic cars over foreign ones), are less controversial and do not provoke as much resistance as actively pushing out cars from public space. They do not threaten the hegemony of the automobile in public space. Nothing has provoked as much public and state opposition as the cycle path on Vajanského Embankment – because it explicitly and actively took space away from cars in favor of people. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – and easier to imagine the demise of a city than a city without cars.

The only point in the election program

Do you want people to have more children? Remove cars from places.

Do you want happier and less anxious children? Remove cars from places.

Do you want to stop the climate crisis and make cities cleaner? Remove cars from places.

Do you want to reduce the world’s dependence on oil and the imperial wars it leads to? Remove cars from places.

Do you want safer cities? Remove cars from places.

Do you want cities with more money – and where businesses and services thrive better? Remove cars from places.

Do you want quieter cities? Remove cars from places.

Do you want a healthier and less obese population? Remove cars from places.

Do you want to reduce living costs for ordinary people? Remove cars from places.

By removing cars, we will not miraculously solve all these problems immediately and completely. The car is not the main factor in most of these issues. But there are few interventions that have a significant impact on so many social crises at once.

This year, local elections are coming. Ask your representatives, mayors, and governors to do just one thing. Remove cars from places. All other promises and projects will then be easier.

The author is an economist and data analyst. From 2019 to 2023, he worked as the chief economist of Bratislava. 

The text was created with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, with representation in the Czech Republic. The publisher is fully responsible for the content; the views expressed in the text do not necessarily represent the Foundation’s position.