throwaway809484

Me neither, but thanks for letting me know.

This is precisely what shines so much in Pontevedra (the city featured in the article) and e.g. Oviedo (another Spanish city that aggressively adopted this policy in 1991). Local shopping benefited so much from banning cars downtown. Little specialty shops and cafes blossomed vs suburban malls.

Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities (<= 250000 inhabitants), unless there's a lot of planning and investments done.

Paradoxically, shopping associations were initially strongly opposed to implementing car-less downtown plans. Only to reckon later how wrong they were.

If I recall correctly, car-less policies were imported from Aarhus and Aalborg, where majors were experimenting with turning some main streets into pedestrian only by the late 1980s.

It's also interesting to note that both Aalborg and Oviedo tend to rank very highly in a few quality of life EU metrics [1]. I know both, and they are pretty fantastic places to work and live in. Everything is within short walking distance.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/studies...

If I was in charge of Apple, I'd refresh the Mac Mini (it's embarrassing its sold with a 4th gen CPU). And slowly build private cloud capabilities.