[sustran] World Car Free Days invites you to drop in

[ecoplan.adsl at wanadoo.fr]

Friday, June 04, 2004, Paris, France, Europe
 
Dear Friends,

This is to let you know that we are making progress in updating on our ten
year old sustainability effort World Car Free Days at
http://worldcarfreeday.com -- and are now ready, we think, to make a useful
contribution.  Let me give you a quick summary of the high points, in the
hope that this may tempt some of you who already have a penchant for public
action measures aimed at bringing on line important changes in terms of our
cities mobility systems, to check it out and possibly put it to use.  Let me
keep this brief:
 
1.	The site is now in pretty good shape for consultation and use, and
in particular is dedicated over the next two months to a major collective
rethinking of the Car Free Day strategy and accomplishments.  For my part I
consider that by and large we are doing quite poorly overall, and that the
potential of a good CFD project continues to be not quite understood.  My
hope is that by pointing up the really good projects and approaches, we may
provide some clear examples, templates for others to look at, understand and
adapt and put to work in their cities.
2.	Our first step in this process is a Strategic Outreach Survey, which
has just today got underway and which I hope will prove interesting enough
that you may wish to have a look and possibly join in with your views and
recommendations. It will take you five or ten minutes to complete, but I
don't think you will regret it.
3.	You may find some value in the Car Free Days in the News section,
which has been carefully cobbled out of Google and is updated continuously.
It provides a pretty good idea of the pace of what is going on under this
rubric. (Not nearly enough, being the answer!)
4.	An important and thus far entirely unresolved issue has to do with
our working relationship with our friends at the UN DESA, Division for
Sustainable Development in New York, with whom several years ago we launched
the United Nations Car Free Days Programme (http://uncfd.org).  This program
has I believe considerable potential in Third World cities, but it is as you
know well a very delicate business and requires careful thought and
meticulous preparation to be useful.  Car Free Days cannot simply be treated
as a quick in/quick out exercise.  Even the smallest projects, little block
closures or whatever need to be carefully prepared.  Your feedback and
counsel on this in particular will be much appreciated.
 
Finally, I would be grateful if any of you might be able to let us now about
newsgroups or lists of people and groups likely to share these interests.
Experience shows that unless you have a couple of hundred current contacts
of people who know and care about our topic, not much ever gets done.  So
all help - including forwarding this note to friends, colleagues and other
related  lists for their information will be most appreciated. 
 
Regards,
 
Eric 

 
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