Not super duper mayors at all, but "The Life-Saving Benefits of Superblocks."

"Fuck a bunch of Barcelona -- we're Mericans!"

Boy, aren't we.

The Life-Saving Benefits of Barcelona’s Car-Free ‘Superblocks’, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

A new study estimates that a citywide plan to limit cars and capture nearly 70 percent of street space for bikes and pedestrians could save 667 lives per year.

When Barcelona officials installed a “superblock” in the working-class neighborhood of Poblenou in 2016, it was fiercely controversial. Closing off a three-square-block chunk of the city to vehicle traffic and reserving those streets for pedestrians and cyclists ticked off motorists, who felt attacked by the fast-and-cheap tactic to reduce car use.

But soon Poblenou residents appreciated the nearly doubled amount of space that they now had to walk, play, and socialize. The resistance soon faded, and five more superblocks have since been implemented around the city; Salvador Rueda, the head of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona, envisions creating 503 in total. The ultimate goal is to turn nearly 70 percent of Barcelona’s street space over to people. It’s a project that has attracted a lot of international attention, and some efforts in the United States to replicate the idea.

Fully executing the superblock vision in Barcelona will no doubt face more challenges aplenty. But a new study published in the journal Environment International offers some new evidence supporting the idea: It can deliver vast improvements in urban health. That’s according to a team of Spanish and American scientists who developed a statistical model to measure the potential outcomes of Rueda’s proposed project ...

Superblocks in Barcelona, with a twist.

From the article.

Let's see who is the first to notice why this is a posting atypical of me.

Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars, updated by David Roberts (Vox)

Modern cities are ruled by cars. Streets are designed for them; bikers, pedestrians, vendors, hangers-out, and all other forms of human life are pushed to the perimeter in narrow lanes or sidewalks. Truly shared spaces are confined to parks and the occasional plaza. This is such a fundamental reality of cities that we barely notice it any more.

Some folks, however, still cling to the old idea that cities are for people, that more common space should be devoted to living in the city rather than getting through it or around it.

But once you’ve got a city that’s mostly composed of street grids, devoted to moving cars around, how do you take it back? How can cities be reclaimed for people?

The city of Barcelona has come up with one incredibly clever solution to that problem.

It’s a bird ... it’s a plane ... it’s SUPERBLOCK