Eric Britton, Earth Car Free Day

Eric Britton is an international consultant, author, and founder of The Commons, a Paris-based nonprofit organization cosponsoring Earth Car Free Day.

Yesterday, as we cyber-labored ever so diligently to make sure that the Earth Car Free Day website and its huge self-managing, tailor-built database could accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of cities, groups, and projects between now and the 19 Apr. start-up, ended up being a day of memories as well as a day of hard work.

For the last few weeks, people of different ages, countries, and flavors have been getting together by Internet and various other communications links to make sure that when the first person showed up at www.carfreeday.com on Monday morning to announce his or her new project or action, we were ready to receive them. The lines were humming not only between Seattle and Paris, but also among Bogota, Pune, Stockholm, New York, and Halifax, and each team was there to do its part.

So, early on Monday morning, when the wires finally began to chatter and the first proposed project came in from Sao Paulo, Brazil, without a snag, we were able to settle back into our distant chairs and breathe a joint sigh of relief. And for us here in Paris, on a very gray day with spring just around the corner, it was a moment to remember.

As memory serves me, the first time I ever heard about anything as bizarre as a car-free day was way back in 1974, at the time of the now-fabled and almost forgotten "energy crisis." It was an upsetting time for many, as oil prices soared and long-established supply lines were interrupted. It was clearly "The End of the World, Part I."

The reactions at the time were all similar -- a combination of panic, outrage, and befuddlement. Few governments around the planet gave the impression that they had the slightest idea of what to do next, while the media helped a great deal by trumpeting contradictory messages and selling hysteria by the bucket load.

And we sure knew who the Evil Empire was in those days. For once, it was not the Communists. The Bad Guys were OPEC, and that was all there was to it.

It certainly could not have been ... us. Oh no! Certainly not us.

After a couple of months of a weird cocktail of global panic and inaction, if you turned to Page 4 (or was it 44?) of your local journal back then, you might have read that the Swiss, those bucolic, yodeling, hardheaded people, had come up with an oddball idea of their own. Here was their reasoning and what they did with it.

Since there was nothing to put into the fuel tanks of their cars anyway, they simply said to themselves, "Well, why not organize a day or two with NO cars? Save some gas, take a break, and have some fun." Which, being Swiss and quite thoroughly of their own minds, they went ahead and did. In all, over the course of the spring of 1974, the entire nation gave the beast a rest and figured out that, "Yes Virginia, there could be life without a car."

And this was the first series of purposeful car-free days anywhere on the planet. There were four in all, all held on Sundays, and all held in Switzerland. Just about everybody in the country loved them. Great idea. Lovely days. But what happened next?

Nada.

The rest of the world paid little attention to this strange idea once the day's paper was tossed and the usual indifference and inertia took over.

And then 20 years quickly skittered by, during which the concept of the car-free day languished. Over this period, there was, of course, a certain amount of attention given here and there to the ever more tortuous relationship between cars, cities, and people. But back in the kitchen, the traffic planners continued to plan traffic (and very well indeed, thank you), and the politicos and their administrators continued to build the roads with my money, while a few good souls hollered in a corner that there had to be more to life in cities than that. But as far as car-free days, per se, were concerned: nada.

And even though I served up what may well have been the first major public piece and international challenge based on this idea in 1994 during the course of an "Accessible Cities" congress of the Spanish government in Toledo, Spain, I cannot for the life of me recall how we got from all that we were doing to try to create cities with fewer cars to the idea of trying a car-free day as a step in that direction. I guess it was just time for the good idea to get back on the screen.

So, on one October morning in an ancient Spanish town built on a hill too steep and with roads too narrow and twisting to ever accommodate the dominant 20th century urban nightmare, an idea was casually spun before a couple of hundred thoughtful people who were ready for it. It was something we would call "Thursday": a day of the week like any other, but one on which, for a change, citizens would get together and see what it might be like to take all the cars off the street.

It was no brighter or more complicated than that. But, as luck would have it, there was someone in the audience from Reykjavik, Iceland, who in June 1996 simply got the people there together to do just that: their own Reykjavik Car-Free Day. And there was another person from La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France who in September of the same year also gave it a good whirl. And there was a third person working at the European Commission who, a few years later, was responsible for creating the European car-free day program that has become so well-known.

The idea has since twisted and turned, seen some good days, and seen more days that made no difference at all. But taken together, all of this feeding of an undercurrent has brought us to this planetary adventure -- a day on which the entire planet is invited to get cars off the streets for a few hours and think about it.

But all it was, was an idea. An itch, if you will.

Tomorrow we will look at what has been called "The Mother of All Car-Free Days": the prize-winning Bogota, Colombia, project that kept 800,000 cars in the garage on 24 Feb. 2000 and led to the world's first major successful car-free referendum.