What actually gets people out of their cars?

Every year or two, a city asks thousands of its residents to write down each trip they made on a single day. These travel diaries are the slow measure of whether anyone has left the car, and New York’s latest is sobering. In the 2024 Citywide Mobility Survey, 38.5% of trips within the city were made by car, slightly more than the 37.7% of 2019. Transit’s share had fallen to 20.7% from 24.7%.

From our library

2024 Citywide Mobility Survey — results (NYC Department of Transportation)

NYC travel survey reveals 61.2% sustainable trips, transit lagging 2019, baseline for pricing debates.

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The trend is the telling part. The car’s share rose through the pandemic years and by 2024 had given back most of that ground, though not all of it, while transit recovered only part of its loss. The lines show both.

London keeps the longest diary. Travel in London 2025 finds that residents made 32% of their trips by private modes, mostly cars, in 2024/25, one percentage point below 2019/20. The share of households without a car rose to 48%. The Mayor wants 80% of trips on foot, by bike or by public transport by 2041; residents are at 68%.

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Travel in London 2025: The travel behaviour of London residents based on the London Travel Demand Survey (TfL)

London residents show 68% sustainable travel, 48% car‑free homes, and shifting post‑pandemic habits.

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Copenhagen moved furthest in a single year. Its 2026 mobility report counts 26% of all trips to, from and within the city by car in 2025, three points fewer than in 2024 and one point above the city’s 2030 ceiling of 25%. Copenhageners themselves made 22% of their trips by car. Cycling slipped too: 43% of trips to work or study went by bike, down from 46%, against a target of half.

Berlin’s SrV 2023 puts private motor traffic at 21.8% of residents’ weekday trips, with walking at 34.2% and cycling at 17.9%. Around Barcelona, EMEF 2024 counts 28.7% of residents’ weekday trips by car, while public transport reached a record 18.2%. Warsaw’s 2024–25 traffic survey splits the city in two: 23.6% of trips ending inside the central clean-transport zone are by car, against 35.5% of trips elsewhere in the city.

Set side by side, the shares look like a league table. They are not quite one, and the caption says why.

The gaps between cities owe more to history and density than to any recent scheme. The change inside each is small. Over five years London’s private-mode share fell by 1.8 percentage points, almost exactly as much as England’s. In Warsaw the survey found the number of cars crossing into the city had risen from 0.96 million to 1.7 million since its last edition, with ride-hailing licences up from about 11,000 in 2018 to about 75,000, every such ride counted as a car trip.

So change is real, slow and uneven, and a city that announces mode shift after one year is usually quoting something else. The question is what speeds it up. The buses, lanes and laws in the next sections each claim an answer.

Boston’s route 28 has been free to ride since 2021. The city extended the pilot to routes 23 and 29 in March 2022, serving Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan along Blue Hill Avenue. Since January 2026 riders have taken nearly 23,000 fare-free trips each weekday on the three routes, and boarding by every door has cut the time buses spend at stops by about 20%.

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Free MBTA bus routes extended through end of year, Wu announces (Boston.com, 9 June 2026)

Pilot delivered 23k rides, cut dwell times 20%, saved riders $20+, funded by $8m ARPA.

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In June 2026 the city and the MBTA extended the four-year pilot to the end of the year, because ridership on the three routes had grown faster than anywhere else in the MBTA bus system. A mid-programme survey found about a quarter of riders saving at least $20 a month, money that often went on groceries and emergency funds.

That is an advocate’s observation, not a count. The pilot’s published results measure riders and savings; none of the sources here says how many of those riders used to drive.

Free fares also have a price. The city pays the MBTA for the lost fares with $8 million of federal pandemic-relief money, and will decide over the summer and autumn what happens after December. The wider network found its own payer: in July the MBTA was granted $530 million from Massachusetts’s surtax on incomes over a million dollars, $450 million of it to cover the operating deficit.

Dublin pulled the other lever, more buses rather than cheaper ones. Under BusConnects the National Transport Authority has been redrawing the city’s bus map in phases since June 2021, running 62% more scheduled kilometres on the redesigned routes. Boardings on those routes rose by 30% between 2019 and 2025, against 6% on routes not yet changed. The dumbbell shows the two groups side by side.

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BusConnects Programme Progress Report, December 2025 (National Transport Authority)

Shows 30% boarding rise on redesigns, 7 of 11 phases completed, ticketing still pending.

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The authority’s own reading is plain: passenger demand responds to additional service. Greater Manchester, which brought its buses under public franchise as the Bee Network, reported its results to the Bee Network Committee in March 2026; the library’s copy of that report cannot yet be read, so none of its figures appear here.

Dublin bought riders with frequency, Boston with price and faster boarding, and both cost money every year. Boston’s free routes run on federal pandemic-relief money; New York’s trains are now part-funded by drivers. Any city copying either should settle first who pays, and for how long.

Since 2012 the municipalities around Copenhagen have built 16 cycle superhighways with a combined length of 244 km. In April 2026 an ex-post study by Impact Economics added up what they had returned: a net gain to society of DKK 6.0 billion over fifty years, a return of 17% against a break-even rate of about 3.2%. On the average route, cycle trips rose by 38% in the year it opened.

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Ex post samfundsøkonomisk analyse af supercykelstierne (Impact Economics, 30 Apr 2026)

Evaluates 16 bike routes covering 244 km, yielding DKK 6 bn net benefit and 17% return.

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The study also asked where those extra cyclists came from. Most were not drivers.

That changes what the routes are for. Health is the largest benefit, DKK 3.9 billion, and most of the gain to cyclists, DKK 2.2 billion of 2.9 billion, goes to people who already rode those routes. The traffic benefits of drivers who switched, from less congestion to cleaner air, add up to DKK 0.1 billion. The bill lands on the municipalities, which pay 98% of running costs and end up DKK 0.3 billion out of pocket, while the state gains DKK 2.6 billion in taxes and health savings.

Under the U1 viaduct in Kreuzberg, Berlin tried something prettier. The Radbahn real-world lab, funded by the federal government from 2019, turned parking spaces under the elevated railway on Skalitzer Straße into a test track with planting, benches, a cycle signal and an air sensor. The funding ended in autumn 2024 and most of the fittings went with it. A recent visit found the stretch empty: it does not join the city’s cycle network, so riders going somewhere do not use it. The district’s plan to extend it by sharing out the lanes of Skalitzer Straße has stalled.

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Reallabor ohne Wirkung? Warum die Radbahn in Kreuzberg kaum genutzt wird (entwicklungsstadt berlin, 26 Jun 2025)

Federal‑funded bike line test ended 2024; fittings removed, 200 m stub isolated, usage remains minimal.

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DublinBikes had the opposite problem, a scheme people liked that never grew. Launched in 2009 and paid for by an advertising company in return for street panels, it still has 1,600 bikes at 115 stations, has not expanded in eight years and has never made money. The council will let the contract lapse in September 2027 and run its own scheme with about 4,000 bikes, e-bikes among them.

Lanes also need a city that keeps building. In March 2026 the Boston Globe reported, citing eleven current and former staff, that most of Boston’s street projects involving design changes had been near a standstill for a year. TransitMatters counts at least 16 major projects that have not moved, among them a $162 million plan for Blue Hill Avenue, the corridor the free buses serve. The mayor says she wants projects to get things “right the first time”.

The used routes join a network, lead somewhere people need to go and stay long enough for habits to form. The empty ones are fragments, or trials that left with their funding. The question for a city is less how good a lane looks than what it connects, and who will still be running it in ten years.

In December 2025 Spain gave its cities a national frame. Ley 9/2025 on sustainable mobility requires local authorities to draw up sustainable mobility plans, brings workplace travel plans into collective bargaining and creates a state fund that contributes to running urban public transport. It also calls for a national strategy for the bicycle as everyday transport.

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Ley 9/2025, de 3 de diciembre, de Movilidad Sostenible

Mandates mobility plans for funding, requiring municipalities over 20k to submit data to a national platform.

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Madrid had written its own rules first. Madrid 360, the city’s mobility plan approved in June 2022, aims to cut private vehicle traffic by 10% and to extend bus lanes to 250 kilometres by 2030. Its best-known measure, a low-emission zone covering the whole city, belongs to the cameras that enforce such zones, which our read on city cameras follows from rule to fine, Warsaw’s clean-transport zone included.

Poland’s supreme audit office looked at how Warsaw had used the tools it already had. NIK’s 2023 audit gave the city a positive verdict: people were travelling more by public transport and bike instead of by car. Bus lanes grew from about 66 km to 82 km between 2018 and 2022, and 30 km/h zones covered about 9.6% of public roads. Public transport carried 55% of trips to work and school in 2022, against 46.8% in the 2015 traffic survey. Almost all of the PLN 3.65 billion spent on transport infrastructure went into the second metro line. The auditors’ main complaint was that the city’s transport plan had not been updated on time.

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Wystąpienie pokontrolne NIK P/23/064: Działania na rzecz ograniczenia zanieczyszczeń komunikacyjnych w miastach (Urząd m.st. Warszawy)

Public report praises Warsaw's metro investment, meets zero‑emission bus quota, but transport plan lagged.

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The measures in this read are of very different ages, and a result means more the longer it has had to settle.

A national act gives a city duties and, in Spain’s case, money. It does not run a single extra bus. Warsaw built most of what the auditors praised before they arrived, and Madrid wrote its plan before Spain wrote its law. Frameworks matter when a city uses them, and most of the record above belongs to cities that did.

City transport teams copy each other all the time, often from a press release. Copy from the team that ran the scheme instead, and ask them for the numbers the release left out.

• To fund transit from drivers, start with New York’s first-year release and ask the MTA how many drivers switched, not only how many stayed away.
• To win bus riders, look at Dublin’s network redesign for frequency and Boston’s fare-free routes for price, and at who pays for each.
• To build cycle routes that get used, read Copenhagen’s superhighways with their ex-post study, then the Radbahn as the warning. Berlin’s process analysis of cycle-lane building shows where projects stall.
• To know whether anything worked, run a travel survey before you start. Berlin’s SrV and London’s LTDS show what a long, comparable series looks like.
• To set the frame nationally, read Spain’s new act alongside the Polish auditors’ report on Warsaw.

The topic page Public Transit & MaaS gathers the projects and studies behind this read, and the Resource Hub holds every source quoted here. If your city is testing a charge, a free route or a new lane, tell us what you are trying, so the next team can find you.