[sustran] Do-it-Yourself: Your Own Car/Free Day

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Dear Sustran Friends: We offer you this working draft for you
information, use and, hopefully, comments.  Regards, World Car-Free Days
Consortium, New Mobility Agenda, Paris.

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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 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


1.      Sign up in the "Own Car/Free Day International Register" (See
http://guestbook.sparklit.com/entries?gbID=113338)


2.      Respond to everyone who contacts you with ideas or questions.


3.      Get around during that one Day without getting into a car by
yourself.


4.      Walk or bike your kids to school.


5.      Ask yourself each time you think about it that day, if you
really need to take your car.  Just then?


6.      If you do go somewhere in your car, invite your family and
neighbors and plan your trip together. (If possible, write it down.)


7.      Plan your trips so that you can deal with multiple destinations
in one trip.


8.      Visit  the nearest carshare club and see how it works (They may
be offering special terms for Car/Free Day participants)


9.      Ditto for local cycling club (and ask if they have an transport
bike support program)


10.  Check out if there is a Walk to School program for you to
join/participate in

11.  Buy a cycle - and start to use it (with care!)

12.  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.)


13.  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)


14.  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.


15.  Participate in the (if there is one) "Car Regrets" poll (tracking
personal experience with deaths and injuries in car accidents in last
years).


16.  Have a party at your house or place of work and invite people to
come xCar.


17.  Set up own, neighborhood or group web site (or dedicate some part
of the existing site to support your and others events).


18.  Write an editorial or letter to your local paper (and send a copy
to us at postmaster at ecoplan.org so that e can public it on the world
site for others to see and think about).


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

 



Organize a Car/Free Day: The nose of the camel.
World Car/Free Days at http://worldcarfreeday.com
To leave list: WorldCarfreeDays-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com
To post messages: WorldCarfreeDays at yahoogroups.com
Also check out New Mobility Agenda at http://newmobility.org 




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