The Guardian has a nice run-down on the state of car-free developments around the world:

• “Oslo revealed plans to ban all private vehicles from the centre by 2019″
• “Helsinki has ambitious plans to make its “mobility on demand” service so good that nobody will want to drive a car in the centre by 2025”
• “Paris’s car-free days have successfully reduced high pollution”
• “New cities – such as the Great City on the outskirts of Chengdu, China, and Masdar near Abu Dhabi – plan to focus on mass transit or electric cars as alternatives to gas-guzzling private cars.”
• “Venice is often cited as the largest car-free city, but they have it easy, with canals and rivers instead of streets.”
• “Hamburg, on the other hand, is currently making waves by enforcing an auto-ban on a number of urban roads to develop a network of route for pedestrians and bikes that link parks and open spaces together.”
• “Madrid, too, is focusing on the city at a human level, and recently hatched a plan to pedestrianise the urban core and expel cars by 2020.”
• “Dublin and Brussels are also toying with the idea of kicking the habit through city centre diesel-car bans, with similar ideas proposed by Liberal Democrats in London following the VW emissions scandal.”
• “Milan is offering public transit tokens to residents for every weekday they surrender their cars”
• “Rome is slowly progressing with parking bans.”
• ” Copenhagen. Unsurprisingly, large swathes of the Danish capital have been closed to vehicles for decades, with bicycle infrastructure reaching into every corner.”
• “Every week in the Colombian capital [Bogota], over 75 miles of urban roads are shut to vehicles.”
• “In Hyderabad’s IT corridor (dubbed “Cyberabad”), a recently launched weekly car ban marks a first for Indian cities”
• in South Korea, a Suwon neighbourhood recently trialled a full month ban in September 2013, which inspired the wealthy Sandton area of Johannesburg to hosts its own car-free experiment last month.”
• “Portland hopes to [have] 25% of trips made on two wheels by 2030.”
• “While modal share for cycling just scrapes an average of 2% in the US, in Davis [California] it’s 20%.”
• “Alongside the expansion of the subway system, segregated bike lanes are slowly creeping into North America’s fifth largest city [Toronto], and there are whispers around a potential car-free street during rush hour.”

Here in Philadelphia, we’re asking if a bike lane is still a bike lane several years after the paint wore off…