IELTS Reading 95: The City That Gave Its Streets Back

Adapted from Penn State / Gehl Architects documentary transcript (2025). IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog30/node/371

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Reading Passage

A. For most of the twentieth century, the default assumption of urban planning was that a city existed to move cars as efficiently as possible. Roads were widened, intersections synchronised, kerbsides lined with parking bays, and pedestrians were treated as a nuisance to be filtered across at pedestrian crossings. Copenhagen followed this fashion like any European capital, and by the middle of the 1950s the flood of private vehicles had grown so relentless that locals simply called it "the car invasion". By the early sixties the centre was choked: pavements had vanished beneath parked cars, and the central squares were little more than asphalt lots. Into this crisis came a decision that looked absurd at the time: in 1962 the city closed off its main shopping street, Strøget — a single kilometre of prime real estate — and banned the cars. No one quite believed it would work. What followed was not a collapse but the opening chapter of a fifty-year experiment in taking public space back for walking. Over the decades that experiment spread outwards, one street, one square at a time, until a city once given over to the car had become, against all prediction, a place where the bicycle and the pedestrian set the rhythm.

B. The predictions of disaster were loud and predictable. Shopkeepers argued that customers would never arrive on foot, that deliveries would stall, and that their businesses would quietly go bankrupt. Danes reminded one another — and everyone else — that theirs was not a sunlit Mediterranean piazza; the weather was too cold, the winters too dark, and foreigners simply did not amble for pleasure. Every expert who mattered, it seemed, had a reason why the experiment was bound to fail, and none could imagine a Northern city centre thriving without traffic. Even the reformers admitted the street was closed on little more than faith. The architect Jan Gehl, who spent decades measuring how people actually used these spaces, has recalled the climate of disbelief with some relish: every expert agreed that a pedestrian street could never thrive in a Northern European capital, that the outdoor cafés would stay empty, and that the city centre would quietly die. The city closed Strøget anyway, and then waited — for the decline, for the empty shops, for the prophecy to come true. It never did. Within a few seasons the cafés were filling, the benches were occupied, and the predicted bankruptcies simply did not arrive; the critics had, in the end, underestimated how much people would welcome a place designed for them.

C. What replaced the cars surprised everyone. Within a generation, eighteen central squares that had once been surface parking lots were reclaimed as places to sit, talk and linger. By the time of the later surveys, Copenhagen boasted around seven and a half thousand outdoor café tables, weatherproofed for ten months of the year. The shopkeepers who had protested most bitterly discovered, to their evident surprise, that the very streets they had feared losing had become the most commercially valuable in the city: people who stroll also browse, linger and spend, and a warm summer evening drew crowds that a busy road never could. Gehl's blunt economic observation was that in a market society no one keeps a policy that harms business, yet here the businesses flourished precisely because the streets had been designed for humans rather than for horsepower. What had been given away to the car, it turned out, was exactly the space that commerce itself needed most. The very retailers who had fought the change became its loudest converts, discovering that a street where people linger is a street where they also spend.

D. Closing one famous street was, however, the easy part. The deeper transformation happened slowly, block by block, through a doctrine that planners call traffic calming. The central idea is that speed is the enemy of a humane street: keep vehicles down to thirty or forty kilometres an hour, and accidents become rare and minor, so pedestrians and cyclists can share the road without terror. Copenhagen enforced this not mainly through signs but through its physical design — raised crossings, speed humps that made excessive speed genuinely uncomfortable, and narrow "shared space" lanes in which cars, bikes and walkers negotiated one another informally, with no painted rules. Alongside these measures came "pedestrian priority streets", where walkers had the right of way but bicycles and slow cars were still permitted. The effect was to make driving dull and slow, not forbidden — a constraint that nudged people out of their cars without ever pushing them. Drivers kept their access to doorsteps, but found the journey so unhurried that they left the car at home for the short trips it had come to dominate.

E. The lesson of Copenhagen has travelled further than its creators imagined. Bogotá began closing more than a hundred kilometres of roads every Sunday for its Ciclovía, inviting runners, cyclists and dancers into streets normally reserved for traffic; Barcelona built its network of superblocks, sealing whole residential quarters to through traffic; Paris, New York and dozens of other cities have since closed iconic thoroughfares to cars. Copenhagen itself is repeatedly ranked among the world's most livable cities, a status its planners attribute less to monuments than to the simple anthropology of putting people, rather than vehicles, at the centre of the street — the bars, bicycles and benches that make a city feel like a place to live. The transferable lesson is not that every city should ban cars, but that the opposite — designing exclusively for them — was always the more radical and less forgivable experiment. The cities that work best, the Danish example suggests, are not those that banned the car outright, but those that stopped treating its convenience as the whole point of the street.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The fierce predictions of commercial ruin ii. How Copenhagen became a port city iii. Parking lots turned into places people want to be iv. Slowing the traffic down, block by block v. The idea spreads to cities on other continents vi. Why private cars are now illegal in Denmark vii. The history of the bicycle industry in Europe

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why did Copenhagen close Strøget in 1962? A. To build an underground railway beneath it. B. The city centre had become overwhelmed by private cars. C. The street had been destroyed by a storm. D. To hold an annual car exhibition.

6. What did the protesting shopkeepers fear? A. That deliveries would become cheaper. B. That their businesses would collapse without car access. C. That tourism would increase too much. D. That the street would be demolished.

7. According to the passage, how did the city mainly enforce lower speeds? A. By issuing enormous fines through speed cameras. B. Through physical design such as humps and raised crossings. C. By banning all cars permanently. D. By relying on police patrols alone.

8. What wider example of the same idea is mentioned? A. Beijing's closure of the Forbidden City to buses. B. Bogotá's weekly Ciclovía closing roads to traffic. C. London's expansion of its orbital motorway. D. Moscow's construction of underground car parks.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Local people named the flood of vehicles in the 1950s "the car invasion".
10. The closing of Strøget immediately ruined the street's retail businesses.
11. Copenhagen now has around seven and a half thousand outdoor café seats.
12. Traffic calming aims to keep vehicle speeds above sixty kilometres an hour.
13. Copenhagen has the lowest tax rate of any European capital.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Copenhagen's planners argued that keeping vehicle speeds low reduced both the number and the (14) __________ of accidents, allowing walkers and cyclists to share the road in informal (15) __________ spaces.

Answers & Explanations

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