Recently Paris and many other cities and towns in Europe observed car-free
days (please see the short article below).  Shouldn't we be encouraging car
free days here so that people can begin to recognize the freedom and the
joys that have been sacrificed to excessive automotive traffic, such as
hearing the birds, talking with neighbors in the front yard (and in a normal
voice), smelling smells other than auto exhaust, letting your children and
pets out to play, not to mention walking and biking on streets normally
filled with traffic.

Maybe we could start small by just encouraging neighborhoods or individual
streets in our localities to declare a car free Sunday afternoon.  Car free
zone signs could be placed at the ends of streets and residents of a zone
who really had to drive somewhere during the car free period could park
outside the zone.

Of course it would be wonderful to eventually have a car free day statewide.
Not only would it reorient our thinking, but also probably generate a lot of
publicity for Vermont and encourage cities and towns in other states to try
something similar.

Gerry Hawkes
Woodstock, Vermont

www.biketrack.com     Please see article below





>> IN TOWN, CAR-LESS: The Christian Science Monitor's Peter Ford reports
from
>> Paris on the car-free day observed yesterday by 67 cities and towns in
>> Europe. Among the benefits: "You could talk to a companion without
>> shouting.
>> And you could breathe the smells that Paris is famous for - the fresh
>> bread
>> in the boulangeries, the scents from fashionable parfumiers - rather than
>> the pervasive exhaust fumes."
>> Read all about it at
>> http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/09/23/f-p7s2.shtml.
>>

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