Car free mega cities

London, Paris and New York; where these cities lead, others will potentially follow. Popularising the idea of
a car-free future in this trinity of iconic metropolises could unleash the potential for all cities to depend solely on viable alternatives for transportation. A bit further down the road, this poses an opportunity to ultimately disincentivise the largest source of transport emissions: private cars.
The climate network Possible aims to raise policy and public support for urban car reduction to meet climate change targets in the Paris Agreement. Transport emissions are emerging as one of the most persistent sectoral sources of carbon, not merely refusing to fall but still very much in the rise.
Realising that electronic cars are no silver bullet to solve this problem, Possible has launched the Car Free Mega Cities project as a two-year intervention to reimagine cities as places where private cars are entirely obsolete. The network thereby takes on the extremely difficult task to shift patterns of behaviour away from car use and change the unwillingness of many to even countenance alternatives.
Aims of the project:
- Co-create and popularise a shared vision of how cities could be much better places to live without private cars.
- Raise public awareness of the viability and attractiveness of alternatives to private cars
- Develop a maximum-ambition, granular, sequenced roadmap to car-free status by 2030 in each city.
- Develop political strategy to win much more ambitious manifesto commitments on car ownership and use in upcoming city elections.
- Make public perceptions of the idea of a car-free London, Paris or New York by 2030 go from alien, shocking and inconceivable to familiar, attractive and believable amongst the electorates of those cities
- Official city authority and other key stakeholder positions on going car-free shift from viewing this as fanciful and utopian to viewing it as a serious, credible and potentially necessary policy option.
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