Ever gone on one of those joyrides with your bicycle and happen to end up at a town that seems completely desolate of any form of four-wheeled vehicles?

If you have, don’t worry, you haven’t gone back in time. You probably just stumbled into Vauban, Germany – a town that has banned cars on its streets.

The truth is stranger than fiction doesn’t it? Apparently, in the case of this town, it’s not.

For those who don’t know, Vauban is a small and quaint little town in the south-west of Germany, bordering Switzerland and France. While the town is far from being a Stepford suburbia, it still prefers the laid-back life of listening to the melancholy chirping of birds and enjoying the cool autumn breeze without having cars making unnecessary contributions to the town’s pollution index.

It’s ironic to think that a country that gave the world a smorgasbord of supercars can have a town that shuns anything that has four wheels, but the truth is, you can still live in town with a vehicle, provided you pay a lofty sum of €20,000 for a space in one of the garages on the outskirts of the town.

Continued after the jump.

Continued

Otherwise, its bicycles or bust in Vauban, and the residents of the town – most of which had cars before moving there – actually gave up their vehicles so they could enjoy the quiet serenity of Vauban. Transportation into and around the town comes courtesy of a tram service that connects to the nearby suburb of Freigburg, where cars are allowed and the town also has a car-sharing system – or as it’s more popularly called, a carpool, so its residents that can still have their transportation options open to them.

Nevertheless, this town has traded in the Autobahn for their very own definition of ‘auto-ban’.