Car Free Days: Origins, Timeline, Progress

Every day is a great day to take a few cars off the street and think about it.

“Frog” wrote about this CFD shot taken in Wellington New Zealand: “This photo below shows the space fifty people in cars take, and the space taken by the same amount of people in a bus.  It’s also supposed to show the space the same number of people on bicycles take up, but the cyclists seem to be mingling in sociably with pedestrians and and other gadabouts and gossipers. There’s even a couple cuddling in the corner! So the end result is you don’t really get a good impression of the space cyclists would take up if they all sat in tidy rows. I guess that’s either the benefit or problem with cycling, depending on your point of view.

Here is how the Car Free Days movement got started and has taken shape over the last 23 years.  This is the first of a series of two articles which we update and post annually just prior to the September rush to get the latest batch of Car Free Day projects off the ground. We hope that these pieces and the references you find here are going to prove useful to those responsible for making a success of their Days in 2017. Getting a CFD right and making it a real success is no easy task and good knowledge of what has worked and not worked in the past should be useful.