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Keywords: street experiments; street space reallocation; public acceptance; mobility behaviour change; temporality
Many cities aim to shift away from car-oriented regimes by reallocating street space from motorised vehicles to greenery, active mobility, public transport and social uses to transition to a more sustainable mobility regime. Two approaches dominate this practice: temporary street experiments (SE), which intentionally test alternative street uses for a limited period (Bertolini, 2020), and permanent street redesigns, which implement lasting physical change without a prior trial on the same site. SE are widely promoted as a low-risk entry point for mobility transitions. Their reversibility reduces financial and political risk and is expected to open temporary-to-permanent pathways (Stevens et al., 2024). Whether such incremental and reversible change leads to deeper transformation, however, remains contested. Research on SE has mainly examined institutional trajectories, distinguishing experiments that are terminated, marginalised, assimilated, or that transform the dominant car regime (Savini & Bertolini, 2019; Zhao & Sun, 2025). Considerably less is known about the residents who experience these interventions in their daily lives.
This gap is relevant because public acceptance and mobility behaviour change are central conditions for the durability of street space reallocation. Reversibility may lower initial resistance, but it also keeps the conflict open and may remove the intervention before new mobility routines consolidate (Suslowicz & Hillnhütter, 2025; VanHoose, 2023). Permanent redesigns, in contrast, exclude a return to the status quo. In Oslo, acceptance of reallocated street space increased after implementation as residents shifted from opposition to adaptation (Hagen & Tennøy, 2021). To date, few studies trace acceptance and behavioural readiness around the same intervention over time, and, to our knowledge, none compares these trajectories between temporary and permanent redesigns using the same instrument (Grandel & Berger, 2025). This paper addresses this gap through a longitudinal before-and-after panel survey in four cases in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
The study builds on a conceptual framework developed in our integrative literature review (Atanova et al., in preparation). The review shows that temporality, participation, public acceptance and mobility behaviour change have largely been studied in parallel. The framework integrates them at the level of residents' experience.
At its centre is a reciprocal relationship between public acceptance and mobility behaviour change. Acceptance may lower the threshold for trying alternative modes, while direct experience of a redesigned street may shift evaluations formed before implementation (Noland et al., 2023). Mobility behaviour change is conceptualised through the Stage Model of Self-Regulated Behavioural Change (SSBC; Bamberg, 2013a, 2013b) in the six-stage form applied in transport research: predecisional denial, predecisional inhibition, preactional, actional, postactional and maintenance (Friman et al., 2019; Olsson et al., 2018). The distinction between denial and inhibition is particularly relevant, as street redesigns may act directly on the external constraints that prevent inhibited residents from reducing their car use. Since the SSBC was developed for voluntary behaviour change, we adapt it to street redesigns, which are imposed on residents regardless of their intention to change, and treat the intervention as an external trigger of stage progression.
Perceived participation quality enters the framework as an input and affects acceptance mainly through perceived procedural fairness (Klaever et al., 2024), whereas participation perceived as tokenistic may harden opposition (Verlinghieri et al., 2024). Temporality conditions how the relationship between acceptance and behaviour change develops. As the SSBC process only closes with postactional maintanance, we expect permanent redesigns to allow this process to be completed, while temporary interventions may be removed beforehand. The combination of temporality and participation quality results in four possible outcome configurations: missed opportunity, fragile progress, permanent failure and durable transition.
The study follows a longitudinal before-and-after panel design with four cases. Temporality is treated as a variable rather than a contextual characteristic, and the same survey instruments are applied in all cases. The permanent cases are two mobility stations in Düsseldorf, at Gneisenaustraße and Römerstraße, opened in November and December 2025. Both were accompanied by a redesign of the surrounding street space, including widened pavements, new trees, seating, bicycle parking, sharing services and restrictions on car access, and were implemented without a prior trial. The temporary cases are StadtTerrassen in Bochum (Rottstraße) and Datteln (Hachhausener Straße), modular parklets installed on former parking spaces for several weeks in summer 2026.
The questionnaire assigns respondents to one of the six SSBC stages and measures overall acceptance together with established psychological predictors, including perceived effectiveness, procedural and distributive fairness, trust, affect and norms. Additional items capture perceived participation quality and attitudes towards testing changes before permanent implementation. Households within a defined catchment around each site were invited by postcard to an online survey. Before waves were conducted in Düsseldorf in autumn 2025, prior to the openings, in Bochum in June 2026 and in Datteln in July and August 2026. The after waves are currently in the field. Personalised identification codes link responses across waves, which allows individual stage transitions to be traced. As temporality co-varies with city, programme and participation format, the comparison refers to intervention models rather than to temporality in isolation.
The before waves are complete, while the after waves are yet to be analysed. The baseline comprises 720 complete responses: 262 at Gneisenaustraße, 270 at Römerstraße, 89 in Bochum and 99 in Datteln. Three initial patterns emerge. First, perceived process quality is low across all cases. Only 16 to 27% of respondents per case agreed that the planning process was transparent and democratic, and 39 to 47% disagreed. At the same time, 60% at Gneisenaustraße and 67% at Römerstraße would accept the redesign before its opening, indicating support despite limited perceived transparency (Spearman's ρ = .67 at Gneisenaustraße, .53 at Römerstraße, .52 in Datteln and .41 in Bochum; all p < .001). Second, between 60% and 78% of respondents in each case prefer changes to be tested before permanent implementation, including at the two sites where no trial took place. Third, stage distributions differ considerably. In Datteln, 62% of respondents are in the two predecisional stages, compared with 36% at Gneisenaustraße, 39% at Römerstraße and 29% in Bochum. Acceptance increases with stage position: across both Düsseldorf sites, 28% of respondents in predecisional denial would accept the redesign, compared with 80% of those in the postactional and maintenance stages.
At the conference, we will present the baseline comparison and first before-and-after results. We expect acceptance and stage position to shift jointly after implementation. For the permanent cases, we expect increasing acceptance and stage progression, particularly among predecisionally inhibited residents. For the temporary cases, we expect stronger shifts in acceptance than in stage position, as an intervention period of a few weeks is short relative to the time new routines typically require to become habitual.
Transition debates often assume that incremental steps accumulate into transformation. Our study examines whether this assumption holds at the level of residents. If temporary interventions shift acceptance without stage progression, their main contribution may lie in building legitimacy for permanent change rather than in changing mobility behaviour directly. If permanent redesigns achieve stronger behavioural shifts despite weaker participation, the preference for testing before committing in planning practice requires closer examination. The study provides a first comparative account, using the same instrument in four different cases, of how residents respond to temporary and permanent street space reallocation.
References
Atanova, A., Welsch, J., & Klinger, T. (in preparation). A conceptual framework for public acceptance and mobility behaviour change in temporary and permanent street redesigns.
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