Car-Free Community

Paris Plans To Replace 60,000 Parking Spots With Trees By 2030

November 21, 2024 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. Create! Bicycles, Car-Free Community, climate crisis, Paris

A newly released plan would see 60,000 parking spots throughout Paris turn into grounds for tree planting by 2030. The goal of the project is to better prepare for extreme heat events by providing shaded green spaces. The plan still requires approval from the Council of Paris to move forward. “Trees and nature are natural air conditioners,” Paris officials said, as reported by Yale Environment 360. “Their development makes the city more pleasant to live in during periods of high heat.” By replacing the selected parking spaces with trees, the project would support a larger city goal to add more than 740 acres of green space in Paris by 2030, with 10% of that green space installed by 2026, Bloomberg reported.

London Saw A Surprising Benefit To Fining High-Polluting Cars

September 24, 2024 Syris Valentine, Next City. Create! Car-Free Community, Cars, Children, emissions, England, Environment, Europe, London, pollution, Transportation, United Kingdom (UK)

Restricting the volume of high-emitting vehicles roaming city streets carries many benefits, from clearing the air to quieting the urban din and beyond. Recognition of this simple fact has led to the proliferation of clean air zones, designated regions within a city where vehicles must meet strict pollution standards or pay a fee to operate within it. At last count, over 300 such areas had been established across Europe. In London, which boasts the largest ultra-low emissions zone in the world, a study has found a secondary benefit: Kids started walking and biking to school more. In 2018 — the year before London’s rule took effect in the center of the city, and five years before the zone encompassed its entirety — researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University saw in the impending policy an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment.

Essential Voices For The Turn Away From Car Dependency

May 24, 2024 Bart Hawkins Kreps, Resilience. Organize! Car-Free Community, Disability Rights, Transportation, Urban Design

In forward-thinking municipalities across North America, elected officials and staff members can learn important lessons by taking on the Week Without Driving Challenge. As Anna Letitia Zivarts describes it, “participants have to try to get around for a week without driving. They can take transit, walk, roll, bike, or ask or pay for rides as they try to keep to their regular schedules ….” In most municipalities, the challenge leads to a difficult but eye-opening week. That’s because in most areas getting around without driving is inconvenient, dangerous, very time-consuming, or next to impossible. As Zivarts writes, Even for participants who might already bike, walk or take transit for some of their weekly trips, we’ve heard that the experience has helped them comprehend the difference between taking the easy trips and taking all trips without driving.

The Case For A (Mostly) Car-Free World

June 12, 2023 Anthony Leong, Canadian Dimension. Create! Canada, Car-Free Community, climate crisis, Transportation

I grew up in Los Angeles, one of the most sprawling, car-dependent cities in the world. It’s easy to find highway-sized lanes in residential areas and signposts right in the middle of tiny sidewalks in my hometown. Although I regularly cycled and took public transit right up until I was 18 and moved away, the state of my city and the way people moved through it was normal to me, a mundane fact of life—I didn’t see that it could be another way. I also didn’t understand just how systemically marginalized pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit users were until I watched a video about “stroads” by the YouTuber Not Just Bikes.

A Dazzlingly Precious Gift From The Future

October 4, 2022 Rob Hopkins, Resilience. Create! Car-Free Community, Communities, Germany, Walkable Cities

The Vauban, Freiburg, Germany - During my talks, I often invite people to time travel in their imagination to a 2030 that’s not utopia, or dystopia, but rather is the result of our having done everything we could possibly have done in those intervening years. We do it because, as Walidah Imarisha puts it, “we can’t build what we can’t imagine”. Unless we cultivate longing for such a future, it will never happen. In spite of having done that exercise now over 100 times, the responses are pretty much always the same. “The birdsong is louder”. “There are far less cars”. “The air smells so much cleaner”. “The streets are full of kids playing”. “There is a strong sense of community”. It’s exciting then to be able to announce that this week I actually managed a spectacular feat of time travel to visit the future they dream of in that exercise, immersing myself in its magic and its deliciousness, with all my senses.

Daily movement news and resources