Already more than half the earth's population lives in towns and cities, and within a few years we can expect this figure to arise to more than 70%. Cities are busy places, and part of this business interprets to people moving around. A lot in most cases. Now the fact is that the dominant model in most places of how you deliver mobility services in cities is, for better or worse, what we might call the "American Model". This model, as is well known, keys on putting as much of the population as possible into private cars and then unleashing them willy-nilly onto taxpayer-financed public roads. These arrangements can work out for many (but not all) people in low density areas in rich coutnries, but the more densely settled the place is the less efficient is this system. And when you finally get into cities, the cost in terms of resources, pollution, safety, lost time, quality of life, and, yes!, even of economy is enormous.

New models for transport in cities are badly needed, but not very many convincing ones are yet on the horizon. For this reason, Earth Day Network and The Commons are getting together to see what can be done to organize an event where are very large number of people and cities around the world will take a day to reflect on what life might be like in their city if there were no or far fewer cars. Would the city come to a complete standstill, as often is argued? Might there be some advantages as well as the obvious disadvantages that might result from such an experience. Might, if we looked closely and together… might we learn something from this process which we could then built on to make a better city and a better and more sustainable transport system?

The mechanism for carrying out this collective questioning process is the organization of a variety of different types of "Car-Free Days" in cities and places all over the planet. And, as we move ahead here, make sure you keep your eye and mind on that word "different". It is going to hold the key to our success.

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Getting it Right! Getting it Wrong!

When you get right down to it there is little that is either radically new or revolutionary in itself about a proposal for a car-free day. In addition to a rapidly growing number of (usually quite small) city center closure projects and pedestrian zones of varying sizes and sorts, there have over the last decades been literally hundreds of cases of towns or cities that have banned car traffic for a single day, some special event, or during some particular (usually crisis) period. That is the state of play in the field, and it is also the problem.

What these projects have in common is that in virtually all cases they are handled as once-off exercises. Typically they are done, endured and quickly forgotten. Little or no effort is made to follow up or build on the experience in a systematic way. Rarely are they planned for with any great precision or real energy. Talk of them to most of the people who have lived through the experience, and they will either laugh (aggressively) or smile (perhaps somewhat ruefully). Not surprisingly given this level of thoughtfulness and performance, the underlying and generally unquestioned consensus is almost always however that these are obviously approaches which can't work in our city, at least not on any regular basis. We had, or will have, our car free day, and after that... back to business as usual!

And yet.. and yet... a Car Free Day, properly done, could present all concerned not only with a day of welcome respite, but with a significant learning opportunity. After all, for that one brief day the city gets turned into a laboratory of sorts, offering an exceptional test bench for observation and analysis. Prepared and carried out with care, these convivial one day events can help us spot lessons and opportunities for making both small and large changes in our town or city, which just might lead to the greater well-being of all those who live and work there. There are, as you will shortly see, a number of ways of going about this. But the basic idea -- that you don't just have your day and then run away from the lessons that could have been learned -- is a consistent theme in all these pages

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Car-Free Days - A Serious Business

A Car Free Day -- a day without cars that is not only a pleasant civic event in and for itself, but also a potentially instructive one at a time when many places are looking for ways out of the cities/cars impasse. The key to a great car free day, one that is going to help the host city take a giant step toward creating its own sustainable transport system, is a combination of meticulous planning, unrelenting inclusiveness, openness to new ideas, energetic leadership and, ultimately and most important, a very broad base of public support and involvement. The goal: to build a consensus for change and some solid ideas of how to move toward it.

Like any other transport investigation, a well planned car free day uses a lot of consultants -- but in this case the input comes not visiting experts in suits, but from the people who know most about what is going on and what is needed: the people of your city who are out there on the street every day trying to make their way to work, school and play, and deserving far better than they are presently getting. The theory behind this kind of initiative is that people are smart and observant and deserve a chance to begin to influence the design of their own movement system. A car free day reveals to them, at least briefly, a city different from the one they have to cope with each day, and gives an opportunity to see and think about another kind of city and another organization of this important part of their daily lives.

The philosophy of this cooperative cross-frontier effort is to encourage diversity and facilitate communication, exchange, and mutual support via electronic and other means. We hope to do what we can to encourage many different types of car free day approaches in many places at many times -- with careful study and widest sharing of results, so that others all over the world can benefit from these precious and necessary experiences.

The organization of a car-free day that has any meaning is no simple public relations gesture. For most people in most places - adults with jobs that they want to hold on to, business people whose very survival in what is already a difficult and uncertain situation for many, families with children who have to get to school safely and on time, mayors and other public officials whose constituency expects that there job is to make their lives better - the tissue of the transport system is central to the organization of their daily lives. It is no casual thing, no pleasantry, no bagatelle. It is - and we chose my words carefully here - a metabolism, an extremely complex, quasi-chaotic system that lends itself to casual monkeying no more than the body and life of someone you hold dear.

Many people in the rich North and those of means elsewhere grow to depend on the cars for their well being and even their survival -- so if we are going to try to introduce some change, even for a single day, we must do this in a mature and fully informed manner. Part of this is to ensure that an appropriate information and consultative process can be set up in each place that wishes to give this a try. And this requires TIME!

The concept of organizing a car free day as an occasion for a city-wide rethink of its transport system organization is an idea that has been around for some time, and in the last few years has begun to see an exploding number of examples -- good and bad, convincing and less so. Probably the best single world source on this experience and its results is the

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Points of View

The world is a big place and, as you might expect, there is no shortage of opinions about what car free days are supposed to be all about, how they are best planned and prepared, what if anything is their value, and how, if at all, we might organize to do better in teh future.

After more than a decade of trying to convince people by word and example that a car-free day can be a good idea for a town, city or a neighborhood, one of the most striking things we have been able to observe as we and others try to go from concept to concrete experience (as it were) is that the world out there divides pretty sharply into four main camps or attitudes: those who never heard of it (the vast majority), those who have and don't care (next largest group), those who have and like it, and those who have and think it's a rotten idea. And within each of these groups there is quite a considerable range of views and theories about what is best and worst about them, both in theory and in practice.

With this in view, we are developing a Points of View section of this site, which takes as its task to give you one click access to a range of these views, and leave it to you to decide for yourself.

And as part of this necessary push to get a full view of our challenge, we can also recommend that you give a moment to the section somewhat ironically entitled Car Free Day Haters, which sets out some of the reactions of important players in every city who also need to be consulted and brought into the cooperative rethink of the city's real tramportation needs and possibiliites.

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Co-ordinators

This is an international team project involving a very large number of participating groups and individual partners, and international allies. All are of equal value and importance to the success of our planetary volunteer partnership, with the most important of course being those who are actually participating in their own local projects and events. The lead in this project was initially taken by two groups who are serving as coordinators:

• The Earth Day Network, in Seattle Washington USA.
• The Commons in Paris France.

Co-ordinator for the Earth Day Network

Earth Day Network
811 First Avenue, Suite 454
Seattle, WA 98104 USA
Phone: +1.206.876.2012
Fax: +1.206.876.2015

Contact: Sierra James

Co-ordinator for The Commons

The Commons
EcoPlan International
8/10, rue Joseph Bara
75006 Paris France
Voicemail/Fax: +33 (1) 5301 2896
Videoconference: +33 (1) 4441 6340

Contact: Eric Britton

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