On the streets in front of apartment buildings in a neighborhood in Freiburg, Germany, people bike and walk in the middle of the road. Kids play in the street unattended. Cars are allowed, but only if they crawl along at the pace of a pedestrian (the speed limit is three miles an hour), give priority to people not in cars, and stop only temporarily for pickup or drop-off. The street doesn’t have parking places.

The neighborhood, called Vauban, was built two decades ago as a radical experiment in sustainability. In some ways, it’s still as radical as it was then. It’s also been a huge success: There’s more demand for the apartments than available housing, and few families who live there own cars. Those that do are now more likely to bike or walk than they did before moving to the area.

“Really, for daily life, one doesn’t need a car,” says Almut Schuster, who works in the neighborhood and who lived there for 18 years. It’s possible to walk to grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, offices, and schools within the mostly middle-class neighborhood of about 5,000 people, which is made up of dense housing in apartment buildings. For those who need to go to downtown Freiburg for work, it’s a 15 or 20-minute ride on the bus or light rail to the central station.

Freiburg, a city of around 220,000 people, is known for its environmental choices, and the city center started excluding cars in the 1960s. Still, Vauban is markedly different from other nearby neighborhoods, says Schuster, who recently moved. Now, living less than a mile away, she sees people drive to stores even when walking would take minutes. On a recent sunny day, she noticed the lack of people outside near the shops in her new neighborhood; when she headed to Vauban later in the day, people were sitting in front of a local grocery talking. “They sit around a little herb garden on the bench and have a little chat,” she says. “There’s bikes all around that store. People are outside more, and talking more. There are more people around.”

The quality of life is a result of a design that very deliberately discouraged cars. When planning began in the area–a former French army base–the city initially envisioned that the neighborhood would be similar to another that had recently been developed. The other neighborhood, called Riesenfeld, also aimed for sustainability, with energy-efficient buildings, jobs in walking distance, a tram stop, and streets designed to slow traffic. But a grassroots group of citizens pushed for something more radical in Vauban: getting rid of parking spots.

Reducing parking “is the key to reducing car use,” says Luc Nadal, the urban development director at the nonprofit ITDP, or Institute for Transportation & Development Policy. That’s partly because it’s typically still more convenient to use a car to reach other areas–so if it’s also convenient to have a car at home, people are more likely to use one even if they have access to a tram or other options. In Riesenfeld, nearly twice as many people own cars as in Vauban. (In Vauban, 183 out of every 1,000 people own a car; in the U.S., by contrast, more than 800 out of every 1,000 people do).

The grassroots organization lobbying for the neighborhood originally wanted to completely eliminate parking. But regional laws required a parking space for every home. Eventually, after some negotiation, the organization was able to reach a compromise–there would be one spot for every two homes, in garages that sat at the edges of the development, so people couldn’t park directly in front of the apartment buildings. The government required another plot of land to be set aside in case future residents changed their minds and wanted more parking; 20 years later, it’s still a park.