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.

It was late afternoon in Paris on 14 Jan. 2000 when the telephone rang dully.

I could hear a distant voice (bad connection?) at the other end trying to get out my name and asking where I might be found. The voice said with an accent that its name was Oscar Edmundo Diaz and that it was calling from Bogota (Bogota?). And that if I was indeed Eric Britton, the guy who had written that planning paper, "Thursday," about getting cars off the streets of cities, then it had a question for me.

When I admitted that it might be me (you can't be too careful these days!), the next thing the voice asked was if I would send by email all the latest materials that we had on the subject, because the people in Bogota, Colombia, had a plan. But they needed to be sure that they were going to have a real running start on it. So I did what was asked, without really reflecting on why the voice had said, "real running start."

Less than 24 hours later, the phone rang again and it was this Oscar, who had something to propose. To which I said "shoot" (perhaps a badly chosen word under the circumstances). Oscar informed me that his mayor, Enrique Penalosa, had decided that if it could be done, a car-free day might be a great way to gain support for a massive long-term overhaul of Bogota's transportation system. And when I said that was what a car-free day was supposed to be about, he asked if The Commons would be ready to work with them on it. And, if so, what would be the next step?

This was a terrific idea and I was more than pleased. After all, a very smart and energetic mayor of a city of some 6 or 7 million people (who really knows?) saying that he was ready to run with the Thursday program exactly as we had set it up five years ago. Not only that, it also was a place with many of the components we had been looking for in a demonstration site aimed at convincing Third World cities to start their rethink process. So I quickly said, "Yes, let's have a go."

Oscar then asked me for a quick plan, which I sketched out on the phone with him. Since he insisted that the city was ready to commit the necessary resources, this was clearly doable. It would be a big challenge (almost a million cars?), but with hard work, luck, and enough time, it was, in my view, quite possible. He asked how long I thought it would take us to be ready, and I suggested that we organize so that it could occur in tandem with the first European car-free day planned for late September.

Then, Oscar pulled the rug out from under me, telling me about his mayor's political reality. Bogota was ready to do a car-free day, and they were pleased to do it on a Thursday and follow our guidelines, but, for specific political and electoral reasons, the car-free day had to take place on the last Thursday in February -- five weeks from the time we were talking.

That, of course, was entirely out of the question and I let him know that in no uncertain terms. And so if they wanted to do it that soon, count me out. I had already seen enough middling car-free day attempts here in Europe, and I certainly did not want The Commons or myself to be associated with what would certainly be the world's greatest Car-Free Flop ever. No Oscar, it can't be done. Count me out. Sorry. Goodbye.

Now this Oscar turned out to be a very cool character and, instead of getting mad, saying goodbye, and hanging up, he just kept talking. He asked me to think about it for 24 hours. Which I did.

Since you know about car-free days, I guess you can figure out what happened next. I called back the next day and said that if they were ready to put in the many thousands of hours of preparation that this was going to take, that if they really understood the magnitude of the challenges, and that if they were ready to prepare some kind of sleeping arrangements in their office and forget about going home for the next five weeks, then I guess they could count on us. In fact, they very definitely could count on us and we were going to make it work.

The rest, as they say, is history. Five weeks later, during which many of us incurred considerable sleep deficits, "sin mi carro en Bogota" opened for business at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, 24 Feb., in a light drizzle, and went on until 7:30 p.m. Latin America's fifth-most polluted city hit the road by foot, cycle, bus, collectivo, taxi, and train, except for a few of the more privileged, who stayed home for the day and gave telecommuting a try. And all but a handful of the 800,000 cars stayed home in the garage.

It was not a perfect day, but what day is? It could have been better, but the results were of course phenomenal and are well-known. By all counts, pollution and noise levels were down anywhere from 8 to 30 percent. For the first time in eight years, no one was killed in traffic accidents (normally, they lose two to four per day), and hospital admissions for accidents and respiratory cases were down by more than 50 percent. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, it should be noted that in our first days of preparation, all the polls showed a very skeptical public (less than 50 percent of those polled said that they thought it might be worth trying). But on the night after the great day, an independent poll found that 87 percent of the population thought it had been a success and that it should be repeated. The fact that the day was spruced up with music, street theater, massive media coverage, events, and smiles did not hurt one bit.

In a way, this was just the start. With such a strong public vote of confidence, the mayor and his team immediately set out to work full-steam on a major reconstruction effort that is already changing the face of transportation in Bogota. The new system is based on a combination of smart new public transportation, heavy participation of small businesses, and for the first time, massive reserved-access provisions for cyclists and pedestrians.

So if you are thinking about organizing a car-free day anywhere in the world, your first point of reference should be Bogota, 24 Feb. 2000, rain and all.