Dear World Car-Free Days Friends, 

 

If you turn to our collaborative site at http://WorldCarFreeDay.com you will see – I hope – that quite a bit of progress has already been made in updating and extending the website.

 

And in this context we would very much like to have some information on and eventually talk to someone to know about your planned (or past) Car-Free Day project for this year.  Who might that be and how can we get in touch?  We would like to be able to share both URL leads and more detailed information on your program to the five hundred or so people from around the world who regularly consult World Car-Free Days for information and leads for their own projects.

 

One excellent way of letting everyone know about your plans and progress is to go to the site at http://WorldCarFreeDay.com and click the “2005 Survey” link on the top menu. This will take you to http://guestbook.sparklit.com/entries?gbID=110020, and from there you can fill in either the Three-Minute form or if you have a bit more time and curiosity about how we see things from here, the full Ten-Minute questionnaire.  This will be useful to the others and we very much hope in turn to you and your colleagues.

 

Before you go to this trouble, you may want a quick reminder of how all this is intended to work. There are in fact no less than three related programs here which form the base. As you will note our long term interest in the idea of taking at least some of the cars off the city streets, if even for a single exemplary day, is part of a much greater interest and concern. Thus our Car-Free Day work is but a small part of our much larger long term New Mobility Agenda, and that in turn of The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative. You can click to the full sites for details and hopefully if you have a look at all you will have a fuller understanding of how we see all this and are ready to work to support it:  But here is some first summary background:

  

·        The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative – http://ecoplan.org
A wide open, independent first-stop-shop on the web for concerned citizens, researchers, students, policy makers, entrepreneurs, investors or social activists interested in quickly getting a feel for world sustainability issues, views and developments from an unbiased critical perspective. We invite open discussion, information sharing, diversity, complex thinking and collaborative initiatives for action.

 

·        The New Mobility Agenda - http://newmobility.org:  
Unconstrained by bureaucracy, economic interests or schedules, New Mobility was launched in 1988 as an open international platform for critical discussion, exchanges of materials and views, and diverse  forms of cross-border collaboration on the challenging, necessarily conflicted topic of "sustainable transportation and social justice". (World Car-Free is a sub-set of this broader long term program.)

 ·        World Car/Free Days Collaborative - http://WorldCarFreeDay.com:
Cities around the world are beginning to work with this ice-breaking sustainability approach. It's not research or theory; it is policy and practice. But proper preparations and follow-up are critical for success. WC/FD offers information, discussion space and an open forum for ideas, exchange and collaboration for people who care about sustainable transport and aren't afraid to work at it.

 

We look forward with real interest to hearing from you and hope that you will find the information contained in our several cooperative programs useful to you in your work to make you city a more sustainable and agreeable place for all to work, live and play.  And should you wish to talk it over, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

 

With all good wishes,

 

Eric Britton

Chair, Kyoto World Cities Challenge: 2005-2007

 

PS.  You may also want to have a look at our latest collaborative international project under the New Mobility Agenda, the Kyoto World Cities Challenge Initiative, for which full details are at http://kyotocities.org.  Might this be a project for your city?  Want to talk about it?  Here are my coordinates.

 

The New Mobility Agenda is at http://newmobility.org

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