The Challenge of Sustainability
It would be a terrible waste if the concept of a car free day as a possibly pretty good and agreeable thing to do every now and then, were to get in the way of its much more serious ultimate objective: which is nothing less than to use this as a step in initiating a process of wholesale citizen-based rethinking and ultimately wise reshaping of our city transportation systems. All over the world.
We think of the car free day, got right, as the first step of a "Trickle Up" grassroots revolution in governance. Let's see if we can explain what we mean by this, starting with the three basic challenges to which the car free day concept is directly addressed.
The first of the challenges to which the car-free concept is addressed is the dilemma of our suddenly awfully-small planet and the environmental threats that are following in the wake of our whole-hearted, not exactly well thought-out embrace of technology. Seen from our present perspective two things are notable about this awful dilemma. The first is that the threat of technology-induced global warming, climate modification and a handful of other critical impacts as well is a real one. The second is that the attempts to deal with it thus far through the apparatus of "government responsibility" or "corporate self-policing" are proving themselves to be painfully inadequate, not to say somehow profoundly hypocritical and wretched.
Which we interpret to mean that entirely new channels of understanding, consensus and action are called for. And this is where concepts as a citizen-led Earth Car Free Day come in. If the "old" structure and top-down approach such as ruled the roost in the main line of eco-confabs such as we have seen over the last years in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and most recently in The Hague, has failed to do the job, it seems like time to see what we can do if we turn the problem-solving process on its head. Which leads us to the concept of a "trickle-up" citizen-led approach of social and economic change... of which car free days is but one example.
Why start with cars? Well, as is widely understood, there are some pretty strong arguments for doing so. First, the simple fact that something on the order of a third of our planetary eco-environmental damage can be traced directly to the transport sector. Second, that the private car has a huge slice of this share. And third, the fact that cars are owned and driven for the most part by autonomous individual citizens (unlike say giant tankers or SST's) who do so as a result of a series of personal choices.
Thus one of the main goals of this first Earth Car Free Day is to take on this challenge, by directly addressing and calling for the contributions and understanding of the individual citizens who can control that vital choice thread.
The second apex of our challenge has to do with those densely settled places where increasingly most people live, and where it is ever more evident that a primarily car-based transportation system brings with it almost always more problems than it solves. The cars/cities conflict/problem list is a very long one, and the important thing is to bear in mind that there is a lot more involved than the "clean air" issues which have so often in recent side-tracked attention and the decision process with interesting but ultimately minor and, given the full dimension of the challenges, altogether inadequate remedial measures. "Clean fuel" and "clean engines" can make a contribution to more sustainable cities, but no matter how effective brilliant and compelling they are - which is not often the case -- they leave much the greater part of the cities/car/access problems unengaged.
The lesson of the past decades in this respect is unambiguous. The only way out of the cars/cities/social justice impasse is through a wholesale redrawing of our city transportation configurations. Cities that manage to do that, places that create a high quality alternative transport system which works "better than a car", are going to be the wave of the future. Their advantages will not only be in terms of clean air, safety, and life quality but also in terms of transport efficiency and economy. But where to start in this process? What about with a day where we take some or all of the cars off the street and begin to think about it together. That, of course, is what a car free day is all about.
It almost always comes as a surprise to people who have not had their ear to the ground on these particular issues to learn that today's auto-based systems leaves a majority of people poorly served. The data however (seldom consulted or exposed) is relentless on this subject. The reality of 2001 is that most people in most places are not doing well with today's most heavily advertised (and of course we have one key there!) mobility package: the private car roaming at will and untrammeled on the taxpayer-funded public road. You know the usual list, but are perhaps not altogether aware of exactly how long it is: people too young or too old to drive, those who cannot really afford a car (including many who are trying to do it anyway), citizens who are for reasons of a whole range of handicaps are unable to drive (with in that slice a growing number of elderly and psychological inapt people who should not be at the wheel), and those who for any of a variety of reasons simply chose or prefer not to drive.
The point is, however, that no matter what the advantages of a car based society may be to those who can do it, there are many others for whom it functions as a form of entrapment and isolation. Thus, women on the average tend to be less well served by the 100% car based system than men, poorer people less well than those better off, people with handicaps less well than those without, the unemployed or marginally employed less well than those with good steady jobs, anyone with asthma or other forms of respiratory fragility more than non-sufferers, and of course anyone whose place of home or work has been altered and made harder to get to as a result of the urban dissipation and sprawl the have followed in the wake of automobility.
To summarize: what this boils down to in point of fact in most places is no more or less than the salient fact that our present car-based system in fact serves well ONLY A MINORITY of the general population. The problem of course is that this minority is the part of society with its hand on the wheel. Hmm.
If the arguments in favor of a far-reaching modification of our city transportation arrangements such as are suggested here are so many and so strong, it makes you wonder why in most places nothing much of any real note is happening. This is where our two "architectures" come in.
For the first of these take a typical American spread city for example, say Detroit, Memphis or Los Angeles. The unadorned truth is that the physical architecture of the city, that is the layout of streets and buildings, and the living patterns that go with it have become so thoroughly shaped by the car culture, that it becomes almost inconceivable to imagine any other way for people to get around. But hang on! If you look at it closely, even in these worse case examples, the basic physical architecture of the city is not as immutable as all that. That same urban space, the street and off-street infrastructure that today is given over for the most part to private cars, as often as not with only one person in them, is an asset that can be exploited in many other and certainly better ways. Which brings us to our second architectural barrier.
And this is the architecture of our minds. We have for a wide variety of reasons fallen victim to unnecessarily narrow thinking about how we use this urban space. And this is the ultimate barrier to adaptation and change for the better.
Let's consider this as an example… what the Germans like to call a "think exercise". Suppose that we take one of our today's transport-inefficient cities, where a majority of people cannot fairly get around and where a lot of the rest waste more time, incur and prompt more danger, and spend more money than they need to in order to get to where they what to go… and ask someone like Federal Express or UPS to redesign the system for top to bottom, just as they did with our old and wildly inefficient package delivery systems in the past? How do you think they would handle the challenge? Lots of small vehicles crammed with state of the art telecommunications taking people from origin to destination in flexible just-in-time groups, reliably, at lower cost and far more swiftly (since we also in our example handed them authority over the road system as well) than the old 1950's system which they have replaced. Moreover, if you open up the market and invite competition, most if not all these of these good things will be yet further enhanced.
That said, we do not wish you to think for a minute that we are necessarily arguing that this is going to be the best way to deal with all our problems of access in cities. We offer this example not as a proposed solution, but as a stimulus to further and broader thinking. The point we are trying to make is that we should be freeing ourselves, our mental architecture, to consider a much wider range of options than today's wholly inadequate binomial view (i.e., you have one of two choices, either private car or mass transit) inevitably leads to. There are a lot more ways of organizing transport in cites than that, and Earth Car Free Day 2001 is intended to serve as an open invitation to give this more thought against a broad and lively backdrop of demonstrations, conversations and actions which taken together begin to provide some hints about this very possible new and different future.
Like most animals, people like patterns. And when we create structures and institutions one of the things that we invariably do is harden those patterns. And this of course can be for the better, or possibly in some circumstances for the worst. We would argue, for example, that in the present context of cars and cities that we have created a pattern that now needs to be broken. But how?
Our answer is to see if in this instance we can create a situation in which a very large number of people get together to focus their attention on a specific set of socio-technical problems -- in this case the use and abuse of cars in cities -- to see if they can come up with insights and support for a whole broad range of new ideas and practices that, taken together, constitute a new pattern or design of the city. In this particular case, the pattern break is keyed on the belief that people in an educated democracy are not only inherently smart but that in a whole range of situations they may be able to be both smarter and wiser than the more formal bureaucratic channels that have been set up to deal with certain issues.
The case of personal transport is an especially interesting example, since it is based in good part on personal choices and personal understandings of their own needs and preferences. The challenge has always been how to aggregate all this individual, personal expertise and knowledge and fashion it into something that is socially coherent. In the past we have relied on experts to do this, which has resulted in a situation in which the power to act and react has been taken out of the hands of the people.
The tools and habits of what is often called the Information Society offer some interesting alternatives in this regard which are certainly worth considering. They offer new ways of aggregating information and knowledge, and of creating a new consensus for change. To our way of seeing things, what they offer above all is the possibility of building new policies and structures, not from the top down but from the bottom up. And that is what Earth Car Free Day 2001 is all about.
The wholesale recasting of a city's transportation system, as is required if it is to become much more sustainable anmd socially just, is a process which inevitably takes time. The day that we decide to do it in any place, there are at least five indispensable ingredients that we need to ensure if our efforts are to succeed:
The last building block of this indispensable underlying structure is that we need to find ways to get time on our side. The transformation of a city's transportation arrangements is a process that has to span not just months or years but decades. Moreover, it is one in which a combination of basic consistency and wide-open planning and adaptation are called for. For the former, what is quite possibly called for is something along the lines of a popular referendum such as we have recently seen in the city of Bogotá, where a majority of the electorate have gone on line to provide a deep legal foundation for a long term policy of car reduction combined with a massive program of new transport service provision which is intended to span a fifteen year period. (You can get a pretty good picture of how this has worked thus far by consulting the Vote Bogotá 2000 site here.)
This kind of approach is worthy of close attention and perhaps duplication in many other places. What the referendum attempts above all to do is to make it somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for future generations of office holders and bureaucrats to but back on the accomplishments of building a more efficient and fair transportation system. It is essential that this process once engaged not be abandoned or reversed every few years. Thus, the idea behind the referendum is for the citizens to get together to create a long run consensus and framework for the new systems and services that are needed in order to move toward sustainability.
The Three Sustainability ChallengesPlanetary
Cities
People
The Two "Architectural Barriers" to changePattern Breaks as a StrategyNew System Building BlocksGetting Time on our Side
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