We live in a world where the mental architecture of most of us here in the rich North sees being a car owner/driver as a perfectly natural, healthy and desirable state of affairs. It is not only part of life, it is so much inculcated into our way of thinking and organizing our own lives that anyone who proposes something to the contrary sounds to most of us very curious indeed.

In just about all of North America and in the other parts of the rich North where the pattern has been set, this kind of talk on the part of someone immediately marginalizes the speaker. "What? Life without a car? Well, that's just not possible." And to make things worse, this has become the dominant mental map not only for the citizens of Phoenix and Calgary, and those who make the transport policy and infrastructure decisions for them, but it has also become the dominant map, the desire set, the wistful wish of most of the Third World as well.

There are of course places in which one can live quite nicely without a car, but this of course is not the dominant mind set. There is some literature on being car-free, and the attached brief essay by Chris Bradshaw written from the perspective of some one living in thoroughly automoblized Ottawa Canada is a good example. At the end of the day, when the various authors parse the alternatives and subject themselves to the actual experience of living in a car culture but without a car themselves, here is a short list of the usual advantages they cite.

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Some Advantages

Behind all of this is the concept of being car-free in the most personal of all ways. If I for example in my personal life am able to be car-free, what does that mean to me and to my family in point of fact?

Economic Savings: Well, first of all it means that we are personally spared a considerable economic burden -- which can work out to anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars a year depending on what we count and where and how we live.

Time Savings: Then there is the matter of time. If you have a car-free life, that usually means that you somehow have managed to organize your and your family's lives within a far tighter physical radius than before. And this saving of distance usually translates to savings of time, almost always considerable. One of the more common calculations shows that people with car-based lives often spend something on the order of three hours a day in their vehicles, which quickly converts to a thousand hours each year or not all that far from a hundred waking days to spend perhaps in better ways?

Community Impacts and Neighborliness: As soon as I reduce the speed with which I move in and beyond my community, and the distances that I am organized to cover each day, and the time that all of that takes me, I begin to develop an altogether different relationship with the area and the people immediately around me. This means not only time for yourself, for your family and for your community, but also a very different kind of relationship as you move more slowly, visibly in and around the neighborhood. And this is the first step toward more neighborly behavior.

Safety and Personal Behavioral Impacts: But what about the impact on yourself in your daily life? Have you ever observed yourself closely when you are behind the wheel? Are you the same considerate, responsible, reflective person you are when playing with your children or talking to a neighbor of a friend? What about your behavior when traffic conditions deteriorate? What about the anxiety that begins to gnaw at you when you suddenly realize that you are running late? What about the level of aggressive behavior that follows that? And bearing in mind that you are steering a ton or so of at best only semi-controlled mayhem, imagine all the awful things that leads to as the harried driver hits the accelerator and not the brakes.

This is the final and most important wrinkle that is behind the car-free day concept, at least as I understand it. Do I really want to be that person who lives a car-full life under these circumstances? If so, that means that my car is more important than the rest of life. And the lives of others.

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Who says it's easy?

Moving from a car-full to a car-free life in most of the western world is not easy thing. Of all the steps perhaps the first is the hardest, and that is to realize oneself what indeed it means to have a "car-full" life? This of course is what we call the "mental architecture". But then there is too the, if anything, even more imposing matter of the physical architecture, that of the city and its transportation systems which all too rarely are laid out so as to give most of us much of a choice.

Which brings us to one of the hoped-for accomplishments of a car free day got right. The exceptional ability to get together with our neighbors and fellow citizen to see what we might begin to do to create the circumstances of a mobility system which fully corresponds to our human, social and economic needs. One in which some people, perhaps in some places even quite a large number will have cars perhaps, but who will use them in ways which do not jeopardize the well-being of the majority of us who need real, first class alternatives.

What keeps me from becoming car-free?

This is an excellent and serious question. And it is one to which there are answers. We hope that Earth Car Free Day 2001 will help us all to understand the choices and what we might do to make them a realistic option just that bit better. The goal of the 2001 happening is not so much to try to convince you on this topic, as to get you to thinking about it.

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