Cars - Car Free Days

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	Cars - Car Free Days

A Car Free Day is an event organized in different places in different ways, but with the common goal of taking a fair number of cars off the streets of a city or some target area or neighborhood for all or part of a day, in order to give the people who live and work there a chance to consider how their city might look and work with a lot fewer cars. While projects along these lines had taken place from time to time on an ad hoc basis starting with the 1973/74 “oil crisis”, it was only in October 1994 that a structured call for such projects was issued in a keynote speech by Eric Britton at the International Ciudades Accesibles (Accessible Cities) Conference held in Toledo (Spain).

Within two years the first Days were organized in Reykjavik (Iceland), Bath (UK) and La Rochelle (France), and the informal was organized in 1995 to supported Car Free Days world wide. The first national program, In Town without my Car, was started in France in 1998 and was established as a Europe-wide initiative by the European Commission in 2000. In the same year the Commission enlarged the program to a full which now is the major focus of the Commission, with the Car Free Day part of a greater new mobility whole.

While considerable momentum has been achieved in terms of media coverage, these events turn out to be difficult to organize to achieve real success (i.e., significant reorganization of the host city's transportation arrangement0 and even a decade later there is considerable uncertainly about the usefulness of this approach. The sine quo non of success is the achievement of broad public support and commitment to change. By some counts by advocates (disputed), more than a thousand cities world-wide organized “Days” during 2005. The results have been extremely uneven.

How it works

The original Car Free Day proposal set out a challenge for a city, neighborhood or group:

:• To spend one carefully prepared day without cars.

:• To study and observe closely what exactly goes on during that day.

:• Then, to reflect publicly and collectively on the lessons of this experience and on what might be prudently and creatively done next to build on these.

The point of departure for this exercise was the determination that you cannot usefully engage in meaningful dialogue with addicts, that what you have to do is start treating them in some way. As often as not this meant thrusting the poor souls into a no-choice situation, at least for a time. In this particular instance the proposed "treatment" was to find an answer to the following question in three main parts:

:• Is there a way to get drivers out of their cars in one or more cities...

:• In ways which will be tolerable in a pluralistic democracy...

:• For at least be long enough to allow those concerned to learn a great deal more about the whole complex of things that need to be adjusted and introduced to make a car-less (or, more accurately, less-car) urban transport paradigm actually work?

One of the main tasks of planners and policy makers is to ask creative questions. Another is to create a process whereby these discussions are brought into the political and technical planning processes.

Commentary on phrase “car-free”

There are several schools of thought as to what is meant by “car free”. The first of these is more absolute: and to those who push for it refers to “cities without cars”. The examples most often cited include the very few cities of the world such as Venice, Zermatt, or Fez that for one reason or another are “car free”, and then to a certain number of cities such as Bogotá and Quito where in Sundays cars are not permitted into major portions of the city.

A good statement of this will be found under the entry Car free movement: :Car-free environments - Places that do not accommodate (permit the entry of) automobiles. Some car-free environments allow motorised vehicles for deliveries and emergency services; other such places use non-motorised alternatives for some or all of these purposes, which is preferable if feasible. Some car-free environments have peripheral parking, and are thus still somewhat car-dependent. Large areas of the world are simply inaccessible by car, and have always been so. Some people take things a step further and work to encourage local use of local products, thus reducing the dependence of their car-free environment on long-distance goods transport and allegedly supporting the local economy over the transnational economy.

This contrasts with a less radical “car free” approach, which the same entry defines as: :Car-light - Either a person or place that is not completely car-free, but uses or allows for a variety of alternative transport modes in addition to the car. On a small scale, this is exemplified by the Living street or Woonerf, now widespread in Northern Europe. In the United States and Canada the term Transit-oriented development is applied to car-light districts. The New Urbanists are a group of Canadian and US architects, developers and planners who promote and build environments that are somewhat car-light, expressly stating that the automobile must be accommodated.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Car Free Days ]

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