Too Fast, Too Furious. A study on traffic’s impact on the perceived livability of streets in Stockholm

Abstract: The cumulative growth that the market of automobiles has seen since the end of the second world war, has had a major impact on both the way we plan our societies and in the way we live our lives. In Sweden from 1950 to 1960, car-ownership increased five-fold, making it the most car-dense country in Europe at the time – bringing along with it major car-centric urban renewal schemes, such as ‘Norrmalmsregleringen’. In the U.S. concerns about the social and environmental impacts of motorized traffic, sparked an interest in research on the ‘livability of streets’. Donald Appleyard found in 1969 that the resident’s satisfaction with their street characteristics and the amount of friends and acquaintances were inversely proportional to traffic volumes. This helped push the narrative that the advance towards auto-mobility had come at the cost of the social life and urban quality of streets and neigbourhoods. In this thesis, a similar study focusing on the impact that vehicular traffic has on streets livability has been conducted. The study uses the municipality of Stockholm as a case and seeks to answer the research question by the means of online surveys and spatial data. The results suggest that increasing vehicular traffic seems to have a somewhat negative impact on the perception of the livability of streets in Stockholm and that streets with less traffic are generally apt to be more livable according to the categories formulated in the survey. However the findings also suggest that there seems to be a quota of ‘enough’ cars, for which when filled, the effects of traffic seems to wear off, and for some aspects of livability even revert aforementioned trend.