The neighbourhood where pedestrians walk in the road

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Could beToday

On a map this neighbourhood looks ideal. A dense grid of short streets, two- and three-storey houses, a school, a church, corner shops. Twenty minutes on foot to the old port, fifteen to the sea. This is precisely how a Mediterranean town should be built.

Now try walking through it with a pushchair.

Where this is

We are talking about the northern part of the Agios Ioannis parish, postcode Lemesos 3016. The neighbourhood is wedged between Archbishop Makarios III Avenue, Markoni street and Misiaouli kai Kavazoglou — roughly halfway between the old centre and the northern suburbs. It is neither a periphery nor a historic quarter: an ordinary residential area, one of dozens in Limassol.

Eight metres for everyone

Here is Akamantos street. Google Street View — nothing cherry-picked, just an ordinary day.

And this is not one unlucky street — the whole neighbourhood looks like this.

Images: Google Street View

Let us add up what has to fit between the walls. Two traffic lanes — 5–6 metres at the very least. Parking along one side — another 2 metres. Two pavements of 1.5 metres — another 3. About 11 metres in total.

What there is — eight.

Eight metres cannot be divided into eleven. Something has to go — and it is always the same thing: the pavement. The car parks half on the kerb, because otherwise oncoming traffic cannot pass. The pedestrian steps into the road, because otherwise there is no way through. The wheelchair user does not leave the house at all.

This is not about bad drivers

It is tempting to blame driving culture: fine people harder, tow more often, run a social media campaign. The problem is that in physical terms there is nothing to fine. A driver who has arrived home has nowhere to leave the car except the pavement — there are no marked bays on the street, and far from every house has a yard.

As long as the rules say “two-way traffic”, the geometry says “there is only room for one thing”. Geometry always wins that argument. The only way to get the pavement back is to first admit that the street is single-lane, and then divide what is left honestly.

The fix: pick one direction

The idea is simple. Make the streets officially one-way, alternating directions, and give the metre and a half you free up to pavements and marked parking.

The 2.9-metre lane is a deliberate decision, not a saving. A narrow lane physically forces slow driving: getting to 60 km/h on it feels wrong even without cameras. That is cheaper and more reliable than any sign.

The next step is to connect the streets so that cutting through the neighbourhood stops being worthwhile, while every house stays reachable by car.

One detail without which the whole thing breaks: cyclists must be allowed to ride both ways. In the Netherlands and Belgium this is standard — a small “except bicycles” plate under the one-way sign.6 Otherwise one-way working lengthens cycle routes and pushes people out onto main roads.

What it could look like

Nothing is demolished, no building line moves, houses and walls stay where they are. Only the way the existing space is marked out changes.

This has been done before

None of this is experimental. The pattern — break the area into cells, remove through traffic, hand the freed space to people — has been running in Europe for nearly half a century, and the results have been measured repeatedly.

Barcelona

Superblocks

In the Sant Antoni superblock, measurements after the works showed NO₂ down 25% and PM10 down 17%.

Photo: Cataleirxs, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Pontevedra

No road deaths since 2011

Traffic in the historic centre fell by 97%. Since 2011 nobody has been killed by a vehicle in the city — against 69 recorded pedestrian collisions in 1998.

Photo: MJSB73MP, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Netherlands

One-way — except bicycles

On almost every one-way street cyclists may ride in both directions. It is just a small plate under the sign — as in the photo.

Photo: Eddie Kips, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What changes, in numbers

Where to start

The main objection to projects like this is “expensive and slow”. The record of other cities says otherwise. In 1977 Groningen split its centre into four sectors literally overnight, using signs.2 In 2017 Ghent changed the traffic pattern on around 80 streets over a single weekend, removing or installing more than 2,500 signs.3 Rebuilding the street properly is the second step, not the first.

A realistic sequence for Agios Ioannis looks like this:

1. A 6–12 month pilot. One-way signs, lane and bay markings, bollards or concrete domes instead of a kerb. An order of magnitude cheaper than construction, and reversible over a weekend if it fails.
2. Measure before and after. Speeds, volumes, the number of cars parked on pavements, a residents’ survey. Without numbers the argument turns into an exchange of opinions within six months.
3. The permanent phase. Raised footways at the new widths, drainage, raised crossings at junctions.
4. Extend to neighbouring blocks if the pilot holds up.

You could start with a single street. Akamantos and Astiggos are good candidates: they are short, they run into arterials at both ends, and they carry almost no through traffic.

Limassol is already heading this way

None of this has to be invented from scratch — much of the same logic is already in the city’s own plans.

Limassol’s Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) foresees turning the old centre into a largely pedestrian area with access for buses, deliveries and residents, and converting Makariou III and Kalipoleos avenues to one-way operation.7 In May 2024 the municipality approved a 30 km/h zone in the centre, with wider pavements and planting as part of the works.8 €14.5 million from the European Recovery and Resilience Facility has been allocated to SUMP projects.

So Agios Ioannis does not need a revolution of its own. It needs the logic already adopted for the centre and for Makariou III Avenue to be carried on into the neighbourhood that adjoins that very avenue.