Make it a Thursday

The choice of day makes a difference!

The Bogotá organizers have chosen Thursday as their target, because they agree that it is important that such a demonstration take place on a 'normal week day' -- not, as often happens, on a holiday or weekend. The reason for this is that the goal is to create a situation in which people will be able see their own city work under 'normal' daily circumstances, but with altogether different eyes.

If you try, for example, to organize a Thursday on, say, a Sunday or holiday, you will probably end up learning almost nothing at all about your city. Likewise it is important that the project be organized (a) not on a day immediately adjacent to the week-end, (b) avoids school holidays or mid-week breaks if there happens to be one in that place, and (c) rather in the second half of the week than at the beginning (so that people will have enough time to get priority tasks out of the way first). Hence the choice of Thursday.

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The Traffic Cam Gambit

1. One of the key goals of a Car Free Day is to create a situation in which people can see their city under substantially different transportation circumstances.
2. In many of the projects in the past few years however, this part of the message did not get through for various reasons, or at least not to the extent that might have been the case.
3. Part of this has to be that a sort of "exception mentality" seems to set in, with the result that most people, while they can see that it is different, do not succeed in taking the necessary mental step to turn this (muted) perception into a useful measuring rod for change.
4. There are several ways of using traffic cameras as one of the ways of getting this message across.
5. A traffic camera is a great way of seeing what is going on in the street in any place, with or without car free conditions. For example, have a look at this one which will give you an idea of traffic in Bogotá at one street corner today.
6. The cost of setting up a traffic camera is slight, as is the cost of integrating them into a Web page. Moreover there is no reason why the cameras and Web links cannot be set up and financed by cooperating groups and businesses all over town.
7. Suppose the organizers in Bogotá could in a cooperative effort put a number of these cams out on the street, and at the same time use a video hookup to capture the images for later examination, analysis and media uses.
8. An additional useful wrinkle would be to tape the cams on both the day before and the day after, with some system for marking the time for each set of images (and these of courses exist, see the text on the above cam).
9. In a final variant, on the Thursday, and on at least some of the site, what could be communicated over the net would be not one but TWO images from each camera: the traffic scene on Wednesday at the same time, and that on the Car Free Day.

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Some Other Concepts to be Developed

Here are a few of the first that come to mind, though it will be through the experience and efforts of the group that the real content will develop.

• Working with the Key Street Partners: Police, taxi and bus drivers, delivery, and other street people (who may not at first be so easy to work with)
• Media Strategies
• Paying for your CFD (public/private partnerships in innovation)
• The School Children Gambit
• "Eyes on the City" (photographs, drawings, computer images, architectural renderings of alternative traffic and transport scenarios)
• New roles for transport modelers
• Car sharing demo
• High capacity bus lane demo (SurfaceMetro)
• TDM demos
• Bike and pedestrian pathing demos
• CFD's and All-Mode Traveller Information Systems (see TransBilbao Express by way of example)
• Support from and working with univesity and technical training institutions

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