REARVIEW: SO CAR free day, or In Town Without My Car Day as it is now called, has yet again come and gone. The question is, did anybody notice? Did anybody care? Was it to anybody's benefit?
The answers are, of course, not very many, not very many, and not very many. So lets cut to the chase here, stop the farce, and scrap car free day in future.
It may well be a day where those who are lucky enough to live close enough to their place of work can cycle into the office as usual and feel some self-righteous sense of doing the right thing, or a day where those who live near some of our impressive new pieces of public transport infrastructure can once again leave the car parked up for the day and enjoy the trip to work.
But for a large number of our citizens, who are still forced into their cars to get about, it is a slap in the face. It has also become a motorist-bashing exercise and a general annoyance for those trying to circumnavigate street closures.
According to the European Mobility Week website, the car free day campaign is aimed at encouraging citizens to “use public transport, cycling, walking” as well as encouraging European cities to promote these modes of transport and to invest in the new necessary infrastructures”.
Amen to all of that, especially the last bit. But after the years of spending what are we left with? Take the capital for example: Two very nice and very efficient Luas lines; a Dart line that serves some people very nicely indeed; and a bus service that is only now realising what we all knew for decades – that sending every bus through the city centre is damaging to cyclists, motorists and to the city centre environment.
The rain is often blamed for the complete failure of car free day and true to form, it bucketed down on this year. But the reality is that if we had started 30 years ago building an integrated and intelligent transport network for all our citizens, every day could be a car free day and there would be no need for the annual token effort regardless of the weather.