The Little Book of Car Free Cities

In July 2017 the UK Government’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) minister, Michael Gove, announced that petrol and diesel cars will be replaced entirely by electric vehicles by 2040. Newspaper headlines have detailed these plans, which is part of the government’s policy to improve air quality in our towns and cities, and have also highlighted complaints and concerns from various interested parties. For example, the AA (Automobile Association) is concerned that the demand for energy to re-charge cars at peak times will overload the national grid. T he Green party are angry that this plan will take too long, and more people will become ill or die early from complications caused by air pollution over the next 23 years. Others have raised concerns that there is inadequate infrastructure to support such a move and that the making and disposal of all the car batteries will be massively problematic. While the argument continues and debates proliferate, the ‘rights of the driver’ and car owners appears to remain protected by government policy; that is, the personal freedom to own a vehicle and to drive it when, wherever and how often the driver wishes. In this conversation, the role of the car and its presence in our lives goes unchallenged. Over the last five years, we have been working on the Liveable Cities project.1 One of the aims of this project is concerned with how cities of the future will ensure wellbeing for its citizens within the context of living in a low-carbon way. We have tried to do this by imagining alternative futures; in this case, we felt it was important to think about a future without the car and this Little Book details a thought experiment where we examined whether cities could function without them.

source :

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339176490_The_Little_Book_of_Car_Free_Cities