Buenos Aires Is Doing a Fantastic Job of Transforming Itself Into a More Livable City!

We can all learn from their experience

I'm incredibly excited to share this story with you. Buenos Aires, the capital and largest city in Argentina, has been reinventing itself as a much more people-friendly city recently, and its great success shows the many people-hostile cities around the world that they don't have to live like that!

The beauty is that change doesn't have to take a long time or be costly. We only need the will to do it, and take actions that matter. Buenos Aires decided that too much space was dedicated to cars, so it simply gave some of that space back to pedestrians, cyclists, and mass transit; they created a great Bus Rapid Transit system in just a few months, and now more than 650,000 use MetroBusdaily and it has cut commutes in the downtown area from almost an hour to around20 minutes!

Incentives have been realigned so that people who really need to go somewhere by driving still can, but others are encouraged to move around differently. In a short period of time, the number of pedestrians and cyclists has exploded and they aren't even done converting parts of the city to the less car-centric model, so things are bound to get even better.

Check it out for yourself:

Great, isn't it?

Gotta love those low speed limits in certain areas, no doubt making pedestrians feel a lot safer even when they have to be relatively close to cars.

SF/Screen capture

Via Streetfilms