Title of Example

Example

The City of Leipzig aims to ban most vehicles from the inner city without hindering commercial and emergency vehicles.

Already now there is no main traffic road going through the city centre (delineated by an inner-city ring road) and the amount of traffic is thus fairly low. The city centre becomes therefore more attractive to pedestrians. In addition, one of the biggest infrastructure projects of Germany will be completed when a “city tunnel” will be build for trains with additional underground stations in the city centre – an action that is widely supported by residents, business people and Leipzig’s population.

The City of Leipzig has a two-tier strategy to further reduce the amount of cars circulating or parking in the city centre: On one hand, the municipality wants to leave the choice whether to use a car to visitors and local people by assuring a large supply of (underground) parking garages while taking on the other hand efforts to increase the attractiveness of public transport.

Key features of the concept are a dynamic parking lead system and removable bollards (see photo) that block the access to the inner city for every vehicle without permission. Those are only given to lorries that need to access an inner city shop, emergency vehicles and buses. The bollards effectively close the city centre to anybody else and to commercial vehicles outside the loading hours of the late morning.

Last Updated

13th January 2005