Do-it-Yourself: Your Own Car/Free Day

In the original project and international call at the Accessible Cities Conference in Toledo Spain of 18 October 1994 , "Thursday: Breakthrough Strategies for Transport in Cities". which set off and gave a coherent international structure to the Car/Free Day movement, one of the most interesting and useful sections was entitled "What Happens if You Don't Happen to Be a City?". You will find the full text of that invitation to individual action at the end of this note.

But suppose that you don't to wait for someone else to decide for you? Suppose you think that you can learn something, perhaps even share something by organizing your own CFD. Let us first see if we can give you a list of things that you and your family might wish to consider doing together to celebrate your own Car/Free Day.

36 Terrific Car/Free Day things you can do by yourself and with your family and friends

Decide you want to try . . . somehow.
Talk to friends and family about it and see if you can find some kind of common position and interesting things you can try to do, possibly together
Respond to everyone who contacts you with ideas or questions.
Get around during that one Day without getting into a car by yourself.
Walk or bike your kids to school.
Ask yourself each time you think about it that day, if you really need to take your car. Just then?
If you do go somewhere in your car, invite your family and neighbors and plan your trip together. (If possible, write it down.)
Plan your trips so that you can deal with multiple destinations in one trip.
Visit the nearest carshare club and see how it works (They may be offering special terms for Car/Free Day participants)
Ditto for local cycling club (and ask if they have an transport bike support program)
Check out if there is a Walk to School program for you to join/participate in
Buy a cycle - and start to use it (with care!)
Put a visible white ribbon on your antenna or external mirror to signal that you are participating in your own or the Car/Free Day (You may be able to develop a common signal for others doing the same thing. That would be great and help to get the message across.)
Invite each member of the family to create a little 'travel log' for the day (name, date, each trip time, purpose, O/D, means of transport)
Make up a simple illustrated local map showing step by step the trip to school (or some other destination), with drawings and photo to illustrate specific danger points. Make a commentary on what needs to be done to make this trip a safer one. Then share it with your neighbors, the school, the PTA, local media and send a copy to us for posting.
Participate in the (if there is one) "Car Regrets" poll (tracking personal experience with deaths and injuries in car accidents in last years).
Have a party at your house or place of work and invite people to come xCar.
Set up own, neighborhood or group web site (or dedicate some part of the existing site to support your and others events).
Write an editorial or letter to your local paper (and send a copy to us at postmaster@ecoplan.org so that e can public it on the world site for others to see and think about).
Write us an email and tell us what you have in mind and what other things should be added to this list.

Own Car/Free Day International Register

Click here to sign up in the Own Car/Free Day International Register"

What Happens if You Don't Happen to Be a City?

(Extract from Thursday: Breakthrough Strategies for Transport in Cities", Toledo, 1994)

Agreeable as the idea may be, there will be many who will find themselves in situations where their city or neighborhood will not be prepared to make the leap and try a Thursday project. How for example can even the most willing citizen hope to participate in such an experiment if you happen to live in the middle of Los Angeles, London, Tokyo or any other of tens of thousands of cities where responsible intelligent people will tell you that "it is just not possible here"? (And that will, incidentally, be the first reaction in most places.)

As luck would have it you have a choice. Anyone who wishes can go out and organize their own Thursday project on their own terms. You don't have to be a city or even a small town. Thus, for example, if you are president of a company, you can get together with those who work there and ask them if they are interested in giving it a try. Or a school or a gym or a hospital. Perhaps you will decide with the members of your bridge club, church or karate group that you are all going to try to see what happens if each of you decides to spend just one day without getting into a car by yourselves alone. Or maybe just the people in your family. Or possibly just yourself -- one person alone who has decided that she or he is willing to take a fling to see what it might be like.

There will of course be no one best way to do it. Each person, group, and place is going to have to figure out the rules on their own. In some cases, car pooling and shared taxis may be considered acceptable, in others only non-motorized or public transport. Each grouping will decide its own rules and live its own experience. But the point that I wish to stress is that this can be an individual decision and does not have to be something that comes out of some government agency or very large collections of institutions and interests.

This is, quite blatantly, not the sort of approach that will appeal to docile, fatalistic or passive citizens. These are concepts that are gong to be picked up only by more thoughtful, individualistic, self-confident individuals and groups.

And it is my belief that there are in our societies many more of these kinds of people than most might think. One of the challenges behind each Thursday project will be to find imaginative ways for all those who decide to participate not only to have their own unique experiences on that day, but also to get together later so that what they have done and learned individually during that fated day can somehow be summed up and inspected from a community or group wide perspective. This suggests a combination of something like individual log books wherein each participant or group can record the detail of their particular experiences, and then some way of adding these experiences up in order o draw some larger lessons from the whole. I have no specific suggestions at this point how the detail of this will best be handled, but I am confident that once the problem has been clearly posed, there will be people and groups who know what to do next. Good organization and careful planning will help, and so too could sensible use of state of the art electronic communications