Cyclists gathered in the town centre last Sunday before pedalling off to Glyne Gap to commemorate Car Free Day.

Modest marking of car free day

Hastings marked World Car Free Day modestly last weekend with a Town Centre gathering and a lovely bike ride to Glyne Gap. Anna Sabin of Hastings Urban Bikes recounts how the day is celebrated elsewhere around the world and the improvements to our lives that creating car free spaces could bring.

The high point of marking World Car Free Day in Hastings came in 2019 when a section of the Hastings seafront was closed to all motorised traffic for a few hours – remembered, especially by children, as a brilliant, exciting moment when a road was theirs to play in. It was, however exhausting to arrange. To really go car free, even for a day, takes administrative leadership.

This year London gave grants to residents to turn their streets into play-streets for the weekend. Paris ignores World Car Free Day but closes its central four arrondissements to motorised vehicles on the first Sunday of every month to complement its 430 miles of new cycle lanes and the riverside motorways which have been turned back into parks.

Pontevedra in Spain has been utterly car free since 1999. Its mayor found himself presiding over a car filled, crime blighted, struggling town and, together with his residents, decreed they go car free. It is, of course, now beautiful and thriving. The challenge remains to spread those benefits to the town’s industrial and suburban outskirts. As it remains also for Paris to green the Peripherique ring road and connect the people of the banlieue, suburbs, without cars.

Towns and cities which most need transport systems which are better than the private car aren’t even here in Europe. Countries in Africa and South East Asia suffer far higher ratios of road deaths as they struggle or utterly fail to keep up with building roundabouts, safely barriers, traffic law enforcement and rapid mass transport. The cars there are not super safe and clean burning either. They’re often the western world’s aging and polluting third-hand cast-offs.

Lagos is said to be the worst in the world for edge-to-edge, bumper-to-bumper, hours-wasted, toxic-fumed, road dysfunction. They had their first World Car Free Day last year and many valiant citizens’ walking and cycling groups are campaigning for more.

Weekly car free day

Bogotá and Jakarta have a car free day every week. Every Sunday morning walkers and cyclists throng along Jakarta’s main avenues and in Bogotá one and a half million walkers, cyclists and roller-skaters come out to be free as birds over 75 miles of carless city roads.

Towns and cities which allow people, of all ages and wealths, to mingle, travel, hang out and hear the same bird song are the sort of places you go to for a holiday – Venice or Vienna, Central Paris or London’s South Bank, Pontevedra or St Ives. How good it would be to live in such a place always.

Public transport is the key and takes determined organising. If it’s to be affordable and up-to-standard, mass transport mostly has to travel on existing roads free of space-hogging passenger cars – as, these days, in Bogotá.

Will people find it a fair exchange – to walk a bit from work or home, to wait a bit for a good clean bus and then share the ride with others through green, safe, bustling towns instead of travelling door-to-door in a car of any sort? Shops within walking distance would get more custom and get better. Children could walk or cycle themselves to school. Retired people could step out, sit on a bench and watch the world go by…

Hastings Urban Bikes and many other of the town’s climate-aware organisations will be working hard between now and the next World Car Free Day – 22 September 2024 – to pedestrianise some shopping streets, install some cycle lanes and increase bus services and their speed. It would greatly help to have these aims in the hearts of our political leaders too.

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