Edinburgh has the fastest growth in car ownership in the UK and possibly Europe. Between 1981 and 1991 car ownership in central Edinburgh grew by 57% while over the same decade UK car ownership grew at half this rate - 29%. While the public have visual evidence of the impact of this trend in terms of traffic congestion and excess demand for car parking spaces, there is still lack of information and perception on the levels of atmospheric air pollution and to what extent it is impacting upon our health. Even less is there an awareness of the social effects of increasing car dependence and the interrelationship with the city’s economic base.

Atmospheric air pollution, increasing congestion, and the developing mobility deprivation of those without access to cars makes it imperative, and not just desirable, that policies aimed at reducing car dependency and encouraging public transport, walking and cycling are implemented as quickly as possible.

Yet rising car ownership and increasing levels of traffic are often considered a measure of economic success. We need to uncouple this link - a successful economy and a quality environment need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, the contrary is increasingly likely to be the case, as modern service-based economies rely increasingly on quality of life factors to attract inward investment and draw in visitors and tourists. But to achieve a "win-win" position means thinking not just about transport service and infrastructure, but also about urban form, economic and fiscal frameworks, and the lifestyles that give rise to the need to travel.

At present, the upward trend in car use appears relentless - more people owning cars, making more frequent and longer journeys. To change this trend will require radical measures. Travel is in itself an unproductive activity - the first aim of a sustainable transport policy should therefore be to minimise the demand for travel without reducing the opportunities for economic, social, educational or leisure activities. The second aim should be to ensure that necessary travel takes place with minimum damage to the environment. To be achievable, measures to work towards these aims need widespread community support.

There are broadly four strategies that can be adopted, a mixture of push and pull measures, and these will be needed in combination:-

• The use of road space
• Integrating planning of transport and the use of land, buildings and public space
• Encouraging more environmentally friendly travel
• Fiscal and regulatory change

Imagination and innovation in all these are needed if we are to achieve sustainable patterns of transport and development. In this paper I deal specifically with the use of road space, and how in Edinburgh we are implementing this aspect of our overall strategy.

As traffic demand has grown, the pressure on transport planners has generally been to increase road capacity to accommodate additional demand. Outside built-up areas this has manifested itself in extensive new road building, which in turn has generated new development pressures adding yet further to traffic growth. Within urban areas, the constraints are much greater. Some towns and cities have constructed new roads, others have maximised the traffic throughput of their existing network. Neither option has provided a long term solution to traffic pressures in any city, and congestion remains a problem virtually everywhere.

One of the reasons that congestion continues to increase is that the main alternative means of transport to the car in most cities - buses - have become increasingly disrupted by congestion, and hence become a less and less attractive alternative. Similarly, congestion and increasing traffic levels make cycling an unpleasant and dangerous activity, and affect the comfort and safety of pedestrians.

In cities in particular, the roadspace available has become more and more dominated by the car. Pavements have become narrower to accomodate extra traffic lanes, pedestrians have been given less crossing time and have to take tortuous routes to cross roads, and everyone is affected by increased pollution. This makes no sense in transport terms, and it also damaging to the economic viability of the city as it becomes more polluted and provides a reducing quality of life to its inhabitants and visitors.

A rational and environmentally sustainable transport system requires a re-assessment of the way in which roadspace is used. In cities such as Edinburgh where rail or other segregated public transport infrastructure is limited, it is necessary to ensure that the roadspace available is used efficiently - and this means removing buses from the general traffic congestion. This is the rationale for the Councils "Greenways" scheme, which allocates significant capacity specifically for the use of buses through extensive and well enforced bus priority on major radial routes. The first routes, on the A8 between the Maybury junction and the city centre and between the city centre and Leith came into operation in August 1997.

More roadspace and priority also needs to be given to pedestrians who have been increasingly squeezed. In Edinburgh, a pilot pedestrian route, with widened footways and alterations to road layout and to traffic signal settings to make crossing of side roads and the major road easier, has been introduced on a route into the city centre. In the city centre itself, footways in the Royal Mile and in Princes Street have been widened, and zebra crossings reintroduced. Such changes are seen as essential to maintain the viability and vitality of the city centre as a shopping and tourist centre.

Edinburgh is largely a "one-storey" city with few underground malls or overhead walkways. Car traffic and pedestrians have to co-exist at the same level, and the conflicts between them give rise to one of the highest pedestrian accident casualty rates in Scotland, a problem that is at its worst in Princes Street, Edinburgh’s busiest shopping street.

Cities exist in order to promote the interchange of goods, labour, ideas, culture through a vast range of activities, both formal and informal. A sustainable, prosperous city will be one that facilitates this interchange by making it easy for people to meet, by design and by chance. The informal, chance element of city life is often forgotten - yet this is probably the key to a city's success, creating the quality of life that attracts people to the city. Street cafes and benches in public squares symbolise that lifestyle.

To enable this requires careful use of city space: there is a delicate balance between space for activities - including public space for the informal aspects - and space needed to provide accessibility to those activities. Where the balance is wrong, the city's economy and environment will be damaged. Over the last forty years or so, more and more city space has been used inefficiently to try and cope with growing car use. Buildings, pedestrian and other public spaces have been replaced by car space, and low density, car based suburbs, business and retail "parks", have taken over former countryside.

Yet the trends can be reversed. This has been demonstrated in Copenhagen. Copenhagen officials have managed (by removing cars in certain areas and turning space over to walkers) to generate thriving open-air public spaces which operate from mid-March through to October. Cafes will now even provide their customers with blankets so that they can drink cappuccinos out of doors on sunny but very cold days in February. The message is that having experienced an improved urban environment, city dwellers have become so used to the ethos that every possible tactic is adopted to extend the season. Such outdoor life offers the attraction of diversity, the unusual and the unpredictable, as well as opportunity to meet people.

Over a number of years, some measures have been taken in Edinburgh to try and improve the allocation of roadspace between different users and between movement and environmental and interaction space. In the Royal Mile, pavements have been substantially widened, leaving space for cafe tables and street performers. However, a significant amount of traffic remains, causing continuing problems.

In Princes Street, car traffic was removed from the eastbound direction in 1996, leaving buses, cycles and for some sections taxis. This change also allowed the widening of pavements to provide some additional space for pedestrians. In the westbound direction, car traffic was limited to one lane for most of its length in 1994, with a two lane wide bus lane in the section containing the city’s busiest bus stops. Studies are being carried out to examine how car traffic can be further reduced.

In the streets of the "first New Town" parallel to Princes Street, traffic management measures have been taken to exclude through car traffic. However there is a large volume of on-street parking in this area, together with substantial delivery and loading activity. As a result, these streets remain busy and at times congested. To provide greater priority for pedestrians crossing the main streets in this area, zebra crossings have been re-introduced into the city.

Jan Gehl, a Danish architect much involved in Copenhagen’s experience, was commissioned in the summer of 1997 to conduct a preliminary appraisal of the City of Edinburgh along the lines of the Copenhagen project. The resulting survey and report "Public spaces and public life, Edinburgh 1998 — First Impressions concerning Potential and Problems" recognises a limited success in some public spaces in the city, including Rose Street and parts of the Grassmarket, but noted that much of the city centre is "... urgently in need of improvement in its amenity for pedestrians." The report is particularly critical about the quality of environment in locations like Princes Street and the Castle esplanade and suggests that the recent designation of central Edinburgh as a World Heritage Site increases the importance of addressing these issues.

The Council has only taken the first steps in managing roadspace to create an environment for the 21st century. But real success requires a much wider range of measures that will reduce the underlying demand and pressure for car use.