What if we got rid of cars?

What if we got rid of cars? — homolova.sk

During the 2026 June heatwave, more than 16,000 people in the EU have died because of heat stress. In cities, the situation is particularly dire. Any city is several degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside, an effect known as the urban heat island. Asphalt traps heat from the sun and keeps on releasing it deep into the night, giving no relief. At the end of this heatwave, I spent a night in my hometown Bratislava to visit my grandmother. She lives on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Petržalka, the concrete jungle I grew up in. It was 'only' 34 degrees that day, but the heat was oppressive. In the evening even with all windows open, the heat would not leave the flat. I did not sleep that night. Car park Park park

Parking lot in Petržalka, Bratislava. My grandma, © All rights reserved, reimagined by Gemini Nano Banana 2 While air conditioning (compared to the rest of the world still relatively uncommon in Europe) might provide momentary relief, it seems more like treating the symptoms rather than grabbing the problem by the roots. The real issue is how we design our cities, the materials we build with, and how we choose to allocate urban space. In this essay, I explore what might happen if we replaced car infrastructure with trees.

Trees are cool Any surface can bounce energy back to the sky, store it, heat the air with it, or spend it evaporating water. Asphalt cannot evaporate water, so it heats the air and absorbs a lot of the energy and releases the heat later. That is how an urban heat island emerges. Asphalt's own surface can swing between roughly 40°C and 60°C on a sunny day, and it keeps releasing that stored heat into the air well after sunset. This is what makes cities suffocating in a heatwave. Trees, on the other hand, cool the city down. Their shade prevents asphalt from absorbing the heat in the first place, and they use the energy they absorb to evaporate water in a process called evapotranspiration. It is what it sounds like: trees sweating! Just evaporating water like this can roughly halve the urban heat island effect. 850 W/m² of midday summer sunshine, with clear skies. Park at 50% canopy, well watered — a water-stressed tree stops sweating. Asphalt Reflected and radiated away340 W/m² Heating the air205 W/m² Into the ground305 W/m²

Well watered park Reflected and radiated away240 W/m² Evaporating water425 W/m² Heating the air125 W/m² Into the ground 60 W/m²

Illustrative values for clear-sky midday summer conditions at mid-latitudes. The asphalt "reflected and radiated" figure is mostly radiated heat, not reflected light. "Heating the air" = direct conduction/convection from the surface. "Reflected and radiated away" = infrared light leaving the surface, absorbed or lost separately from that airflow. See detailed methodology below. It's not crazy Raising tree coverage could prevent deaths. Yet Europe is short of the green that does the cooling. This year scientists looked at 862 European cities to see how many adhere to the 3-30-300 rule: 3 trees visible from every home, 30% neighborhood canopy cover, and a park within 300 meters. They found that 15% of the population live in areas that meet all three criteria, while even more (21%) live in areas that meet none of them. While ground in cities is scarce and valuable, there is one type of infrastructure we do allocate a lot of space to: cars . So what if we removed some of that car infrastructure? Car park Park park

The Belvedere Courtyard, Vatican City. Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC BY-SA, reimagined by Gemini Nano Banana 2 Turns out, good things happen. Pontevedra, in western Spain, banned most cars from its center in 1999. Traffic fell 53%, air pollution 67%, and the last traffic death was 15 years ago. Oslo cleared cars from its downtown core and turned the parking into benches, bike lanes and pocket parks. Paris set to remove 70,000 on-street parking spots and 24,000 were gone by early 2026. Barcelona's superblock plan aims to reclaim around 60%–70% of the street space currently given over to cars, converting interior streets into space for pedestrians, bicycles and trees. In fact, cities they work better without cars. Time and time again when a city has closed off streets or removed parking spots, instead of increased congestion, the cars simply vanish. And trees, they are good for us. Being around trees has been linked to a range of health benefits, including lower blood pressure, less stress, a slower heart rate and lower rates of diabetes. It's an act of wellness and the Japanese have the word for it: 森林浴 (森林 = forest, 浴 = bath). So what would happen if we sacrificed cars to trees?

Parks vs parking For this little experiment, I have cut every city into 500 m squares. 500 meters is a five to ten minute walk, depends on how fast you go. In each square I measured how much of it is car infrastructure (road and parking) and how much is urban green, spaces you can...

What if we got rid of cars?

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