How to halve car usage in less than a decade – a tour of Gent

How do you slash car journeys from 55% of trips to 27%, and increase cycling journeys from 22% of trips to 37%? It’s a question only Filip Watteeuw, Deputy Mayor for Mobility in Gent, Belgium, can answer. Under his bold leadership, the city has transformed in less than a decade and on a limited budget.

It’s not been easy, and Watteeuw has felt the full heft of the noisy minority. Over the years, he has received death threats and been yelled at in the streets.

Even so, he persevered. Now, the city is buzzing with people walking and wheeling, and pollution levels are 18% lower than they once were. And Watteeuw is still in office, having been re-elected in 2018.

To find out exactly how he has done it, we arranged to meet Watteeuw and his communications officer Sofie Aelterman for a tour of the city — by bicycle, of course.

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Filip Watteeuw in Gent, Belgium

How has Watteeuw changed Gent?

Watteuw has changed Gent by taking inspiration from the great Dutch cycling cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. Quite simply, he has made it very difficult to drive through Gent, and very easy to cycle. Crucially, though, he has done it in a quick, cost-effective way.

“The iconic cycling cities are so far ahead: Copenhagen, Utrecht. If you go there you feel, and I felt it myself, that it’s impossible. The infrastructure is so huge and it takes such a big budget and so much time that it’s impossible to get to that level," Watteuw told GCN.

Instead, Watteeuw used the existing road network. With new rules for drivers, and a few adaptations to accommodate cyclists, he turned driver’s roads into cycling streets in just a few days.

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Built for cars, repurposed for bicycles. The paint is to show this is a section border

In the years following, he built around that foundation and refined the edges. It’s all part of a three-stage plan. Step one, limit cars. Step two, build infrastructure. Step three, build a cycling culture.

Read more: The Dutch turned the Netherlands into a cycling utopia. Here's how we can do the same in other countries

Step one: Limit cars

Watteeuw implemented a highly controversial change to the road network in April 2017. His ‘circulation plan’ portioned the city into six sections around the central pedestrianised zone. Under the new rules, drivers could not drive between sections — instead, they had to head out to the ring road, drive around the outside of the city, then re-enter.

As a result, very few people use a car to get around the city. No surprise, then, that car trips have gone from 55% of journeys to 27% since 2017.

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Gent's circulation plan: cars must use the ringroad to move between zones

Watteeuw is keen to emphasise how fast and cheap the change was:

“The circulation plan had a huge impact. It was simple, cheap and fast,” he says. “The only things you need are signs, cameras, some blocks and some bollards.”

Crucially, the boundaries between the borders are marked in paint, not blocked with barricades. It means emergency services, waste collection trucks and trams can get through the city with ease.

To discourage people from driving into the city, he has removed thousands of car parking spaces — instead, people must park in the outskirts and travel in on a bike or public transport. In many cases, central car parks have been converted into green spaces with trees and lawns.

Local business owners thought the changes would kill the city. In fact, many of them still do:

“It’s so fixed in their head: ‘I need to have the cars to have my shop…’ No! It’s not necessary!” Watteeuw says with exasperation. “It’s been proven in several studies — cyclists shop more and they spend more.”

Indeed, businesses are thriving. As we ride, we see several company-owned cargo bikes and delivery cyclists – businesses might grumble when you restrict cars and vans, but they quickly adapt.

Read more: How bike lanes sidelined cyclists: unearthing 190 miles of 1930s cycle lanes

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A postal worker tows an electrically assisted trailer through Gent

Step 2: Build infrastructure

Initially, Watteeuw did not have enough time or money to make purpose-built bike paths. But having cleared the roads of most of the cars, they were soon a lot safer and more appealing for cyclists to use.

To make the existing road network even safer, he turned many of the shared roads in the centre into bicycle streets, where cyclists have priority and drivers are ‘guests’ on the road, meaning they can’t overtake and must give way. On others, he simply banned cars completely and gave the roads over to cyclists.

In the past seven years, he’s been working through pinch points in the network. One junction at a time, he is turning a road network that was built for drivers into a network built for cycling. It’s a detailed process that includes checking if the incline of slopes is gentle enough, and testing new tram lines that are cycle-safe.

“We made space with the circulation plan, and on that base, we worked further. We invested further infrastructure — our second policy line — and also in cycling culture and other domains.”

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Forgot your lights? Vending machines sell essentials around Gent

The most impressive are the vast underground bike parking centres across the city. Each one contains either a vending machine selling cycling essentials like inner tubes and bike lights, or a city-owned bike workshop where mechanics fix bikes. It means commuters can drop off a punctured bike at the start of the day and come back to find it fixed a few hours later.

“That’s a service you have to give to cyclists,” says Watteeuw. He knows that something as simple as a puncture is enough to prompt people to leave their bike at home and jump in the car.

The idea is that these shops provide ‘get you home repairs’. They don’t offer a complete service, but they will make sure your brakes work, your chain is okay and that your tyres are inflated.

“We don’t want to get into competition with regular cycling repair people,” explains Aelterman.

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A mechanic fixes a bike in a workshop underneath Gent's library

Step 3: Build a cycling culture

The city-owned bike repair workshops are just one example of how Watteeuw is building a culture around cycling. These shops are also a social initiative: they hire inexperienced mechanics and train them, giving them the skills they need to get a job at one of the many private bike shops around the city.

Elsewhere, bike taxis provide a valuable service to elderly or disabled people, whilst giving people who are new to Gent a way into the local community. For €2.50 (the same as a tram ride), people with restricted mobility can request a door-to-door ride in a special passenger tricycle, piloted by a volunteer. Seeing these taxis zipping around the city, it’s clear that the passengers enjoy the ride, but Aelterman highlights that the volunteers get a lot of value out of the initiative, especially for people who are new to the area:

“They learn the language, they learn the city, they build a network, so it’s a win-win on different levels.”

The cost of cycling can be prohibitive too, so Watteeuw has provided a fleet of hire bikes to lower the barrier to entry. He points out the rows of shiny green bicycles in the enormous bike parking basement beneath the city library:

“These are our own bikes,” he explains. “Students can hire them, and also tourists can hire them. And for students, it's very cheap — €80 a year. And there are about 8,000 students a year who rent the bikes.”

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City hire bikes ready to be distributed to students and visitors

Pushing through the resistance

You don’t have to spend long in Gent to understand why fewer cars and more bikes is a good thing. I stood with Watteeuw and Aelterman at a large bicycle junction, once one of the busiest traffic areas in the city, almost constantly gridlocked during waking hours. Now, the only sound is of children playing in a nearby school playground.

“The most beautiful compliment I ever got was when a citizen said that I was the best city composer ever in Gent. I have no musical talents, but he could hear the sound of the birds and the children and so on, and that was a great compliment.”

But the pushback against Watteeuw is still there. During my time in the city, I spotted stickers on bicycles and lampposts bearing a picture of Watteeuw with the caption, ‘NIET LANGER WELKOM!’ ('not longer welcome') — seven years on, Watteeuw is still fighting that noisy minority.

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Not longer welcome: a sticker on a bicycle in Gent

I noted that many people would be surprised that he has survived re-election, given the criticism.

“It's the other way around,” he explained. “It's difficult not to be re-elected if you do such things. But you have to do it with full force, with belief, with passion — it’s not just a technical domain. Even when there is resistance, go further.

“Too many policymakers are afraid of the noise from the loud minority who are car addicted, but to be afraid is not a good guideline for policymakers,” he says with a wry smile.

Filip Watteeuw has shown that you can transform a city with limited resources. His pragmatic approach ruffles feathers, but it demonstrates that it is possible to create a substantial shift in how a city works in just a few years. Best of all, he’s shown that people will vote for it. Local authorities, governments and planners worldwide, take note.

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