Realising car-free developments within compact cities

Abstract

Car-free development has been discussed in different parts of the world as a sustainable mobility strategy. Nonetheless, real efforts are limited temporally, such as on annual Car Free Days, and spatially, such as to car-free housing in the suburbs of small to medium scale European cities or car-free zones within the central business districts of large cities. The experience of Discovery Bay, Hong Kong, is being analysed in this paper to demonstrate that car-free development can and has happened in compact cosmopolitan cities like Hong Kong since the 1980s. The population living in this car-free development has reached over 12,000 in 2014. A virtuous cycle of car-free development, building upon people’s underlying environmental and social values, can be sustained by coordinated transport and land use planning to satisfy diverse needs and through local participation. Nonetheless, many challenges of “car encroachment” still lie ahead.