International Car Free Day Campaign

International Car Free Day Campaign
Originally uploaded by rllayman.

Necesito aprender mas español para disfrutar mas el blog Platforma Urbana desde Chilé. (Although the website has a button for English translation. And interpreting the images requires no Spanish language skills whatsoever.)

Platforma Urbana has great images and entries always.

Currently there's an amazing image about sprawl (houses vs. agriculture) and notice about the International Car Free Day Campaign, with a link to the European campaign, which has lots of interesting stuff, even if the website in English is syntactically messy.

And if you read Spanish, there is a link to an interesting pro-bicycling website in Mexico, Bicitekas to which I will be adding a link.

International Car Free Day Campaign
If you look at some of the things that come up for this campaign via a google search, you see that there is some questioning about the Campaign in terms of leading to structural changes.
Car Free day in Austria, 2005.

When I first came to DC, I worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the nation's leading consumer group concerned with nutrition.

For many years, CSPI sponsored "Food Day," a national campaign executed through local efforts. After a few years, the organization re-oriented its efforts, believing that most of the year was spent organizing around that one day, and that more results could be obtained by focusing on structurally-oriented advocacy efforts.

The change was controversial at the time, but there is no question that CSPI has been incredibly effective, especially given the power differential between the food, hospitality, and beverage industries vis-a-vis the relative pipsqueak of a consumer group.

A few years later, CSPI went through another transformation when it reoriented its newsletter from policy and advocacy to, for the most part, self-help information about nutrition. This lead to a massive increase in "membership" (even if most people subscribing to the newsletter consider themselves to be subscribers rather than members) and income, which contributes to the advocacy and structural change efforts that CSPI continues to be engaged in.

WRT "International Car Free Day," it's probably important to do both.

To support local efforts and awareness building campaigns about mobility alternatives and reduction in the number of single occupancy vehicle trips, while at the same time developing more comprehensive local and regional mobility agendas and working towards achieving the desired improvements and changes.

One of the things I hope to accomplish within the next 18 months is the organization of a regional transit advocates and advocacy conference--to work towards the development of a such an agenda, less constrained by "official" planning and politics.

For example, the diagram Dan Malouff created showing ways to conceptualize a "regional" railroad system rather than two separate "commuter railroads," is the kind of re-thinking that I mean.
Image © BeyondDC.

Transit marketing, constituency building, getting reaction to the ideas of transit-shed/mobility-shed planning, are some of the things to cover.

Index Keywords: mobility; car-culture;
transit