Impactos da moderação de tráfego na vitalidade urbana

Abstract

The coming of the automobile onto the scene in the late nineteenth century, followed by an unconditional adhesion of most people to a new standard of comfort and status, caused a significant change in the life of cities, creating new habits, new insights and changes of urban standards to meet the growing needs of space by those machines. These spaces, that used to be meant for people to walk around, live together, rest and gaze upon, were replaced by traffic lanes and parking spaces, thus creating a culture of a hierarchical privilege of drivers over pedestrians, or, more appropriately, of cars over men. The increase in mobility afforded by the new technology, first seen as beneficial to society, resulted gradually in a decline of quality in urban life. Opposing voices have always been heard, and have gained more strength since the 1960s, when the increasing loss of quality of life in the cities showed that it was necessary to take measures to stop the process and seek, instead, the recovery of urban vitality. Several cases of restrictions on car traffic in urban areas were then implemented, especially in residential ones. Starting from the assumption that the invasion of cities by automobiles has reduced the quality of urban life, the point in this paper is whether the reciprocal one is true, that is, if the imposition of traffic and parking restrictions recovers the loss in quality of life. In search of an answer, we have tried to understand the concepts of urban vitality, to investigate which conditions make certain public places, such as streets and squares, be more lively and attractive to people. These conditions are condensed into a matrix of criteria, which is applied to the analysis of a set of sections of streets in Belo Horizonte, selected and classified into categories according to the level of traffic reduction measures they have been subjected to, by checking the intensity of different conditions that are met in each case. The aim is then to assess what the relations between each level of traffic reducing interventions are, the fulfilment of these conditions and the observed urban vitality. This analysis, avoiding the ordinary concept of assessing traffic reducing measures through usual Traffic Engineering indicators, such as speed, volume and safety, aims to understand, instead, how the association of these measures to others in the realm of architecture and landscaping are reflected in the increase in urban vitality, in the ability to attract people and promote their presence and enjoyment of public places. We hope, in this way, to create a new perspective for Traffic Engineering projects, through which it would also be possible to envision, in addition to their traditional goals, measures to promote an increase in urban vitality in the cities.