Not just self-interest: How car dependence shapes the acceptability of street interventions in Barcelona

Urban street-space interventions such as pedestrianizations, bike lanes, superblocks, and school streets are increasingly used to reduce car dependence and improve public space, but they often face political resistance. A central question is whether opposition among drivers and car-dependent households reflects a direct attachment to automobility or whether it operates through more specific concerns about personal costs, freedom, and everyday routines. This paper examines this question using the ATRAPA-BCN survey, a cross-sectional survey of 2,000 adults living in Barcelona and its metropolitan area. We estimate nested ordinary least squares models for four street-space interventions, progressively introducing car use and perceived household car need, expected personal impact and freedom loss, public-good beliefs and fairness, and trust in the City Council. Descriptively, car use and perceived household car need are associated with lower acceptability across interventions. However, once perceived personal impact and freedom loss are introduced, car use is no longer independently associated with acceptability for any of the four interventions, while perceived household car need remains more persistent in some cases. Perceived personal impact is the strongest and most consistent predictor of acceptability, and freedom loss retains an additional negative association. Public-good beliefs and social fairness also remain positively associated with support, indicating that acceptability is not reducible to expected personal consequences. Overall, frequent car use alone does not explain opposition. Support is more closely associated with whether people feel their household needs a car, how they expect the intervention to affect their daily life and freedom of movement, and whether they see it as beneficial and fair.