Pedestrians are always first in Antwerp

From seducing citizens with convenient mobility options to creating living streets with a maximum speed of 20 kilometres per hour and tapping on smart solutions, Koen Kennis, Antwerp’s Vice Mayor, shares how Antwerp is pulling out all stops to create a more walkable city.

Writer
Serene Tng

What has been the city’s key focus since the award of the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Special Mention in 2020?

Koen: A key focus is on creating a modal shift in our city. We are, in fact, busy with “seducing” people to change their habits. We don’t believe in obliging them or prohibiting certain things. We want to seduce them by creating, for instance, very good, comfortable, and safe bicycle paths.

Additionally, we are ensuring there’s a good offer of attractive alternatives. In English, there’s a very nice term for it: it has to be ‘convenient.’ If it’s convenient, people will use it. So, we have a lot of shared mobility options. If you have good, accessible shared mobility, a modal shift will occur in cities. Therefore, shared mobility is very important.

Antwerp has been accelerating its construction of bike priority streets including at the Troonplaats area as shown above. © Frederick Beyens

A significant area we still need to improve, in collaboration with the regional government, is our public transport system. This is crucial as it forms the backbone of good mobility alternatives. At both the regional and federal levels, train services need improvement so that more people from the wider region will use public transport in the future and change their commute to the city. Instead of coming by car, they can drive to the station, take the train, or drive to a park-and-ride and take a tram, for instance, to the city. We have built very large, recognisable, safe, spacious, and well-lit park-and-ride facilities so that people feel secure and comfortable using them.

Within the city, we’ve already achieved a good modal split among inhabitants, moving towards 40 per cent cars and 60 per cent other modes. The challenge now is to extend this shift to our broader region around the city.

Looks like a lot has happened since 2020.

Koen: We are also rethinking and redesigning some of our roads. If you look at the Ring Road, on the south side, we have a connection to the Left Bank that was what we called a “spaghetti knot” of roads crossing over and under each other. Because it’s an exit and entrance for the Ring Road but also connects to one of the highways. Our Department of Roads is completely rethinking and rebuilding this intersection.

A rendering of Ringpark Zuid, showing the solution to the spaghetti knot. © Flywel

It will also become a completely new park and a new interchange, serving as an exit for the highway and changing the road infrastructure within the city. We will open an area where currently trams, buses, and bicycles all have to pass. We will redesign it to create a public transport hub with shared mobility and bicycle facilities. Cars will be directed to another bridge that connects much better to the city’s main roads. This way, cars won’t have to go through smaller streets in the city anymore, and we’ll have a much more logical entrance and exit for the city. That’s a very important change, and the area around it will also become part of the South Park, making it another one of the ring parks we are building.

A rendering of the new cycle bridge over the Scheldt. © OMGEVING SBE

Something that isn’t ready yet, but we will do, is creating the first fixed bridge over the River Scheldt. This will be a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, which we want to build to complete our “ring” for cyclists. I find it a very strong symbol because it demonstrates that we dare to invest a lot of money in bicycle infrastructure. That’s very important. It will be a technical challenge because sea ships will pass under this bridge; the river will still function as a waterway, which is also very important for modal shift. The bridge will eventually also open sometimes to allow ships to pass through.

Tell us more about The Living Streets project started in 2020.

Koen: We started thinking about it during the COVID-19 period. Antwerp is a medieval city with small streets; we don’t have a lot of space, so sometimes the sidewalk is only a metre wide. We had to find another way. We considered that in the 16th century, everybody walked around in the city.

What we in Flanders call “Rue à Vivre” means that everybody can use the public space simultaneously: pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, including trucks delivering goods. But only at a maximum speed of 20 kilometres per hour for safety, and pedestrians always have priority. We also have some pedestrian-only zones in the city, mostly in commercial streets (not all, but many). There are loading and unloading zones with specific time periods for trucks. However, most streets will become what we call “Rue à Vivre.” You could call them Living Streets or Residential Areas, or something similar, but a direct good translation doesn’t exist.

An example of a living street in the Schuttershofstraat neighbourhood, where it is turned into a car-free pedestrianised shopping area. © Frederick Beyens

It’s also a public domain that is on one level. Normally, you have curbs, then the street level, and then a slightly higher sidewalk. This concept is on one level, completely using the same material. So, it’s flat paved, with no differentiation except for parking spaces, where there is a slight difference. The idea is to bring this to perhaps 80 per cent of the streets within our 16th-century boundaries – to be clear, it’s not the whole city, but specifically in the centre of the city, in the medieval area where streets are smaller, and people are crowded together. We are progressing well; we now have 41 per cent of these streets completed, and we want to achieve more, aiming for approximately 83 per cent of those streets.

What does it mean for Antwerp to be a smart city of the future?

Koen: I don’t believe we can continue building more and more new infrastructure. At the same time, we want to grow as a city and increase our prosperity. This will inevitably lead to more mobility because we observe that prosperity brings mobility, and vice-versa. In working on the modal shift, we ‘seduce’ people to choose for themselves, by offering good alternatives, but we also must help them make that choice. For instance, to help them decide, “How can I go to work?” In most cases, people in the morning stand in front of their mirror and think, “Okay, my car is in front of my house. I can park at my workplace, so I’ll use the car.” They probably end up in congestion, but it’s the easy choice because they don’t have the train and tram schedules memorised.

The combi-model Route Planner app was introduced to make it easier for people to better utilise all forms of public transport modes and services to move around easily. © Frederick Beyens

We created a Combi-model Route Planner, which helps people see how they can travel to work. There’s a big difference between Google Maps and “Smart Ways to Antwerp.” In Google Maps, you must manually select “car,” then if you want public transport, you select “public transport,” and so forth. The problem is that it’s not connected. So, it doesn’t suggest, for instance, “Drive with your car to the park-and-ride, and then take the train.” Our “Smart Ways to Antwerp” app, which we developed, shows scenarios like, “If I live on the Left Bank of the Scheldt River, I can go by bicycle or car to the water bus stop, take the water bus to the city centre, and then take a shared bike to my workplace.” It’s user-centric. What’s important is that we can improve how people utilise all types of infrastructure, modes, and services delivered on the street. It’s about better utilising your existing infrastructure.

We have a company, Ush, that is doing something similar for cars. It can be a step towards autonomous cars. In the United States, you see problems sometimes with autonomous taxis in San Francisco when the taxi doesn’t know what to do because it’s autonomous and hasn’t been taught that specific scenario. The idea would be that if you have a driver in a control room at that moment, they can help the car proceed. That’s Ush’s concept. For instance, they also aim to reshuffle shared cars. You use a shared car, leave it somewhere, but nobody picks it up. Nowadays, they send a driver to bring the car back to a place where it’s more frequently used or where more cars are needed. They are now setting up a pilot with Poppy, one of the shared car companies, to try remotely driving cars back to a location where they are more used.

I find this type of innovation very good, and I always say, “Don’t do too many pilots, but also roll out.” That’s true, because otherwise it remains just a pilot. We always say Antwerp is a living lab for this type of thing, not only to experiment, but preferably also to roll out and do it on a bigger scale. You must make sure that the things you do are useful for the user. If the user is happy, then it will just scale up automatically.

What is the significance of the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize for cities like Antwerp?

The nine-hectare Park Dok Zuid in Antwerp, transformed from a car park into a key public space for residents and visitors. © Sigrid Spinnox

Koen: The significance of the Prize is that it shows you are actively engaged in these types of initiatives, that you are undertaking projects worthwhile for the rest of the world to observe. It also clearly encourages the city to continue working on such projects and to remain innovative, constantly doing new things. On the other hand, perhaps the most important aspect is what we’re doing here – exchanging ideas, learning from each other, seeing what’s happening in different cities and how varied it is everywhere. You can’t say that every city has the same issues or the same solutions. But you can always pick out some interesting things and appreciate the differences between cities.

If you look at Singapore, for instance, it’s a completely different city from Antwerp, and I see that. Also, in Europe, when we discuss European cities, you see that London is not a city like Antwerp, but there are things we can learn from each other. For us, it’s interesting that we can look to other cities not only on a European scale but also on a global scale. O