Hello Readers,
Today, I was directed by a Dickinson alumni newsletter to an interesting BBC radio broadcast about Cars and Culture. The piece looks at the political ideology behind car use in the US and USSR during the cold war. While focusing on the US culture, the piece briefly references the concept that the ideals of individual freedom for which the car originally stood may no longer hold true.
This got me thinking about my personal car situation. I sold my car before leaving for grad school, and now that I have returned to the US I have decided to see how long I can go without buying a car. Fortunately, I have landed a job in a relatively small town and my new job is at a place that has company cars and vans. This means that my lack of car ownership will only affect my own personal travel ambitions and not my employment.
Of course, my circumstances are somewhat unique, but after visiting Boston this past weekend I was reminded that living without a car in other places could also be possible. On the other hand, I have to ask why living without a car needs to be the exception rather than the rule.
To help answer this question, I took a look at CarFree.com. The website outlines some of the basic requirements for cities designed for car free living. Such a place would even take things a step further than allowing people to reasonably live without cars. Instead, such places discourage car use/ownership and offer better alternatives!
The website references a number of places that are car free or have car free zones. However, I could not find any examples of towns that had been retrofitted to be car free (i.e. had once been designed for car-use, but are now car free). Does this mean that entirely new towns and cities need to be built in order to achieve freedom from cars? I plan to continue investigating this concept. If you find any examples of retrofitted car free towns, please let me know!
Until next time,
Sean Diamond
P.S. another promising car free resource: http://www.worldcarfree.net/
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