Let's Start Celebrating World Carfree Day (in America and Canada)
This post is directed a bit more to Americans than a typical post might be, and that is because America can be fairly isolated from goings on in the world, by accident or choice, or just the reality of our physical separation from much of the rest of the world. But the message goes for everyone in any city or town that does not yet participate.
Let’s start celebrating World Carfree Day! (more).
I wasn’t too surprised to find out that most of America, it seemed, had never even heard of World Carfree Day. That’s September 22nd, every year, no matter what day it falls on. It just passed us by about three weeks ago.
Many of us here in America and Canada know about and participate in Bike-to-Work Day, which typically occurs on the third Friday of each May. That’s fine; it seems to work for raising awareness of the bike as a valuable form of transportation. But doing something on a global scale—participating in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across the globe—can have a larger impact.
And with World Carfree Day, the idea of biking is not tied to just transporting yourself to and from work. It is about imagining a world without cars, without the need for cars. All forms of transport—even walking!—can join in. And it helps us build an awareness of the need for intelligent urban design, the lack of which helped get us to this disastrous point in the first place.
There have been lots of social movements that started as local social movements somewhere else in the world, like Ciclovia (and, I’m happy to report, cities in the U.S. and Canada have jumped all over this movement). By joining forces with people the world over, we can build worldwide momentum for more fairness in transportation. By joining forces with the people of the world, we not only elevate the awareness of the destructive nature of automobiles, but we are better able to sense that this is ultimately an issue of doing what is right—it becomes something larger than just “getting dirty cars off the streets.”
Americans have now been pointing to Bogota, Columbia, as an inspiration in changing our cities and towns into more livable places, and now I want to help return the favor to the rest of the world.
In many parts of India and China, a growing middle class has an appetite for cars. Some people in these places and others (like America) have the idea that driving a car is glamorous or “respectable”—that it makes one special and shows that one is dignified and classy. They got that false image from American television and movies.
By joining in the World Carfree Day Movement, Americans can explicitly reject the notion that cars are anything but an especially toxic form of cancer. The good news is that it is a curable form of cancer, as many cities and towns throughout the world are now starting to demonstrate.
So get in touch with your local bike and/or pedestrian organization and float the idea, and let’s make sure Canada, America, and the rest of the world join forces for World Carfree Day 2009.
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