City of Utrecht looking for examples of the effects of redesigning streets on car traffic

This relates to the effects on car traffic, both in the street concerned (e.g. street is congested now, what will happen if you take away a car lane) and on alternative routes ("waterbed effect", causing problems elsewhere). The effects in the street itself can usually be tackled, also through traffic and intersection modelling. The secondary effects, however, are more difficult to measure. It seems that transport models tend to make these effects bigger than they turn out to be in practice, since they do not properly model, for example, the more psychological impact.  Existing literature indeed underlines that generally this effect tends to be less high (http://contextsensitivesolutions.org/content/reading/disappearing-traffic/resources/disappearing-traffic/). Many cases were used as a basis for this study, but they are not very recent and more focused on pedestrianisation or the creation of bus lanes.

The city of Utrecht is therefore looking for concrete examples with appealing pictures of preferably quite recent projects where:

• streets that are and remain part of the main urban road network have been redesigned with less space for car traffic (but no ban) in favour of walking, cycling and / or public space;
• effects on car traffic have been monitored both in the street and on alternative routes (actual numbers are not needed, just the information that effects were indeed monitored and hopefully positive).

If you are aware of such examples, please contact Marc Degenkamp, m.degenkamp@utrecht.nl.