Car-Free Days


World Car Free Day, which is celebrated on September 22, encourages motorists to give up their cars for a day. Organized events are held in some cities and countries.
The events, which vary by location, give motorists and commuters an idea of their locality with fewer cars. While projects along these lines had taken place from time to time on an ad hoc basis starting with the 1973 oil crisis, it was only in October 1994 that a structured call for such projects was issued in a keynote speech by Eric Britton at the International Ciudades Accessibles Conference held in Toledo.
Within two years the first Days were organized in Reykjavík, Bath and La Rochelle, and the informal World Car Free Days Consortium was organized in 1995 to support Car-Free Days worldwide. The first national campaign was inaugurated in Britain by the Environmental Transport Association in 1997, the French followed suit in 1998 as In town, without my car! and was established as a Europe-wide initiative by the European Commission in 2000. In the same year the Commission enlarged the program to a full European Mobility Week which now is the major focus of the Commission, with the Car-Free Day part of a greater new mobility whole.
Also in 2000, car free days went global with a World Carfree Day program launched by Carbusters, now World Carfree Network, and in the same year the Earth Car Free Day collaborative program of the Earth Day Network and the World Car Free Days collaborative.
Currently Bogotá holds the world's largest car-free weekday event covering the entire city. The first car-free day was held in February 2000 and became institutionalised through a public referendum.
According to The Washington Post, the event "promotes improvement of mass transit, cycling and walking, and the development of communities where jobs are closer to home and where shopping is within walking distance". Studies showed that for short trips in cities, one can reach more quickly using a bicycle rather than using a car.
While considerable momentum has been achieved in terms of media coverage, these events turn out to be difficult to organize to achieve real success and even a decade later there is considerable uncertainty about the usefulness of this approach. Broad public support and commitment to change is needed for successful implementation. By some counts by advocates, more than a thousand cities worldwide organized “Days” during 2005.
In September 2007, Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, held its first Car-Free Day that closed the main avenue of the city from cars and invited local pedestrian to exercise and having their activities on the streets that normally full of cars and traffic. Along the road from the Senayan traffic circle on Jalan Sudirman, South Jakarta, to the Selamat Datang Monument at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle on Jalan Thamrin, all the way north to National Monument Central Jakarta, cars are cleared out for pedestrians. Since May 2012 Car-Free Day in Jakarta is held every Sunday. It is held on the main avenues of the city, Jalan Sudirman and Jalan Thamrin, from Senayan area to Monas, from 6 AM to 11 AM.
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While not an officially organized Car-Free Day, every year traffic in Israel stops for more than 24 hours in observance of Yom Kippur. This encompasses all motorized vehicles, including cars and public transportation. Cycling enthusiasts of the Hiloni stream and other religions take advantage of this, and roads become de facto esplanade and cycleways. Air pollution in Israel that day, measured by nitrogen oxides, dropped by 99 percent.

International car free days

First ten years

The Environmental Transport Association set the initial annual Car-Free Day on the first Tuesday in their Green Transport Week. In 2000 it was agreed to make it a self-standing day held on September 22, originally as a pan-European day organised under the auspices of the European Commission and later with international extensions—during which a large number of cities around the world are invited to close their centers to cars. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transit and other forms of sustainable transportation are encouraged on these days. People can reflect on what their city would look like with a lot fewer cars, and what might be needed to make this happen. Advocates claim that over 100 million people in 1,500 cities celebrate International Car-Free Day, though on days and in ways of their choice. This claim, however, is not confirmed.
Over the first decade of the car-free day movement, the world has seen hundreds of cities giving the approach a try in very different circumstances, some good, some undeniably bad, some of them on several occasions.
Activists in this field wondered what were the actual accomplishments. They suggested that it was agreeable to have a pleasant day with fewer cars and probably fewer accidents at least in some parts of the city, but considered that this was not the bottom line. For them the goal of a car-free day had from the beginning been to serve as a small step, as a catalyst in a much larger and more ambitious process of citywide systemic transformation toward a more truly sustainable mobility system. They suggested that with rare exceptions they were not seeing anything like that.
The persons involved in the movement thought that after ten years it was time to stand back and see what, if any, difference this approach had made. They asked themselves if CFDs made here or there had produced any significant permanent impacts on cities and the ways human beings get around in them. They wondered if they could be content with what the great bulk of these projects and programs had achieved and just keep going on as-is, or if it were not time to stand back and look again. They decided to fight complacency with a new international collaborative program starting in 2004.

Timeline: Some major events

The following chronology assembles some of the main events of the last decades, which together have gradually built on each other's accomplishments to leave us today with a movement that is only now beginning to get under way. There are a very large number of cities and events that are not covered here.
The 1994 Car Free Day Call set out a challenge for a city, neighborhood or group:
The exercise considered car users to be "addicts" who need to be "treated" in some way. The organisers considered this to mean that motorists should have no choice but to be without cars, at least for a time. In this particular instance the proposed "treatment" was to find an answer to the following question in three main parts: