This summer, the German capital has announced plans to pedestrianize some vital central streets starting in October. One experiment will ban cars from the main section of Friedrichstrasse, a long, store-filled thoroughfare that, before World War II, was considered the city’s main shopping street. Another will test daily closures on Tauentzienstrasse, another key retail street, with a view toward going permanently car-free in 2020.
These plans are notably muted compared to, say, the blanket car ban in central Madrid, or London’s new Ultra Low Emissions Zone. But they are nonetheless ground-breaking for Berlin, and could do much to slash the presence of cars in some of its busiest areas. [...]
There are budding efforts to go further in Berlin, as well. There’s talk among the city’s Greens—still too hazy to count as proposals—of banning cars in inner Berlin by 2030, after an interim congestion charge. And this Saturday, a group of activists who favor a city-wide car ban are planning a demonstration intended to temporarily shut down Western Berlin’s Sonnenallee, a long avenue bisecting the fast-gentrifying working-class district of Neukölln. Lined with affordable cafés and restaurants, Sonnenallee also has traffic that can sometimes be deafeningly loud, making what might otherwise be a promenade for strolling into something that sounds and smells like a race track. Piloted by an organization called Autofrei Berlin (“Car-free Berlin”), the demonstration hopes to amp up pressure to free the space from private cars.
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