People always ask our Streetfilms colleague Clarence Eckerson, "Sure, you always do films about pie-in-the-sky ideas like banishing cars from the center of cities, but do these plans ever really work?"
The answer? Ghent.
In 2017, the Belgian city banned cars from its inner core, but also created a circulation plan that prevented drivers from using small residential streets to go from one neighborhood to another, instead requiring them to head for the outer ring road before coming back into town. (Eckerson did a movie about that six years ago.)
The result is a city that is slightly more inconvenient for drivers, but immeasurably better for everyone else.
So join Eckerson as he revisits Ghent — and finds that everything is working exactly as planned:
