Car Free Four Days

Wouldn't it be great to cut our car use by over 50%? That's what pledging non-use of the car for FOUR DAYS every week adds up to. You are now well on your way to a completely CAR FREE life. Perhaps you've found a good line of public transit to and from your place of work, or you can walk there or bicycle as much as possible. Of course weather can sometimes make it tricky. The car is like a deluxe rain parka on wheels. But is that reason enough to avoid a little rain or snow? There are great outdoor clothiers out there; splurge on some great boots, socks and insulated clothes and leave the car streetside for as many days as you can handle. You'll be exercizing, getting your heart healthier and helping the planet recover from all the driving we used to do.

Car Free Three Days

Hey, I can count. This is the next level of commitment to the Car Free program, which is actually a search for freedom FROM cars. We accept that cars have given us a type of freedom to roam the earth in search of fun, pleasure, speed etc, but at what cost? The biosphere is being ruined by pollution, not just from cars and trucks, but from power plant emissions, airplanes and other causes. The freedom to travel we've known in the past must be let go of and new pleasures found that do not extract and brun up so many resources. So if you can live without your car for three days of the week, leave it sitting there in the driveway or wherever, and mark the vehicle with the words CAR FREE THREE DAYS. What a tremendous thing you are doing!

Car Free Two Days

The second step of the CAR FREE ONE DAY program is, of course, CAR FREE TWO DAYS.
As an attainer of the CAR FREE TWO DAYS level you pledge to no car use for 2 entire days each week. That might mean you take the entire weekend off from using the car. You walk to the store. Or you spread the 2 days across the week. Perhaps you already avoid using the car 2 days a week and are already there. The double entendre in CAR FREE TWO DAYS is CAR FREE TODAY, which implies not using a car right now or ever, Free from car problems in this life. This is the ultimate goal of this program, like a weightloss program with the goal being a weight of 0 pounds.

Someone practicing this level of commitment to Car Freedom should have sticker(s) on the car that read CAR FREE TWO DAYS. You deserve the celebrity.

Welcome to Car Free One Day

Hello. The purpose of these blogpages is to encourage the gradual decrease in all of our dependence on the use of the automobile in everyday life. So we have developed a series of simple ways of thinking to encourage less car use. It begins with the slogan CAR FREE ONE DAY, which has multiple meanings: first, that we will try to choose one day of the week in which we do not start the engine of a car all day, and second, that ONE DAY we hope to be completely FREE of the problems that CARs are causing us. Problems like smog, traffic and danger to bikers and pedestrians, global warming caused by petrol consumption and the oil infrastructure around which the entire society has been built.

We are imagining that some forward thinking people will pledge (to themselves for now) to begin weening themselves from automobile use, beginning with the pledge to make ONE DAY of the week an auto free day. It might be a weekend day on which you can base your transit needs through some other systems, whether walking or bicycling or taking existing public transit. Choose a day of the week and try not to use the car on that day every week. You can start to enjoy re-scheduling your life so that your CAR FREE DAY is a pleasure in its being CAR FREE. If something comes up that forces you to use the car on your FREE DAY, we suggest swapping it out with an upcoming day in the week, or take 2 days off of car use the next week. The idea here is not to cut your legs off, but to set reachable goals for yourself and to begin thinking creatively about how to cut back on the carbon footprint each of us places on world resources every day. And devising a model for thinking that can spread and become useful to many people. Many people are just not used to thinking about cutting back on consumption and we need to learn how to offer people good ways to be part of the solution. In the not-too-distant future we will have no choice on the subject; driving will be a luxury rarely enjoyed by most of us because the consequences will have added up into the massive problem we can now see on the horizon. And it's a fairly bleak picture unless we all begin pitching in very soon.

We have a bumper sticker graphic that we may print up and distribute, depending on how we feel this project fits into other conservation projects.

Idea created by Pamela Wylie and Owen O'Toole. Thanks for looking in.