Car-free days

On car-free days, people are encouraged to travel by means other than cars. Some cities, like Jakarta and Tehran, have weekly car-free days. Other such days are annual. World Car Free Day is celebrated on September 22. 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. The concept dates from the 1970s but was popularised in the 1990s.
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.
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 (Accessible Cities) Conference held in Toledo, Spain.
Within two years the first Days were organized in Reykjavík (Iceland), Bath (United Kingdom) and La Rochelle (France), 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.
In 1996, a Dutch action group, Pippi Autoloze Zondag, started a national campaign for car free days. Pippi organized monthly illegal street actions to take over the streets and stop the cars. After blocking the streets, there would be parties, picknicks, kids playing, rollerskate on the motorway, street painting and music artists playing. The police would break the party down and make arrests. Pippi went on to create a Dutch national group to fight for car free days. Pippi lobbied every single national parliament politician from the Netherlands and inspired Dutch national parties to adopt the concept of car free days in their agenda. Every major city government in the Netherlands received Pippi's proposals to implement car free days, forcing them to debate the issue. After two years of actions, several cities in the Netherlands relented and started to implement car free days.
The Environmental Transport Association set the initial annual Car-Free Day on the first Tuesday in their Green Transport Week (around 17 June). 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.
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.
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:
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 not an officially organized Car-Free Day, every year traffic in Israel stops (except for emergency vehicles) for more than 24 hours in observance of Yom Kippur. This encompasses all motorized vehicles, including cars and public transportation (buses, trains, taxis, airplanes etc.). Cycling enthusiasts of the Hiloni stream and other religions take advantage of this, and roads (except in religious neighborhoods) become de facto esplanade and cycleways. Air pollution in Israel that day, measured by nitrogen oxides, dropped by 99 percent.