#CarFreeApril - 30 days of car-free challenges
In launching this blog, we’ve spoken to lots of people (mainly on social media because, you know, lockdown) about their attitudes to becoming carfree.
There was a huge amount of positivity! Loads of people recognised the ecological and social benefits to less car-use. Not everyone was up to living fully carfree, but lots were keen to use their car less after lockdown than they did before.
As a child we had a car, and most of the journeys we made as a family were by car, but I remember my excitement one weekend when my dad and I were planning to travel from Liverpool to Sheffield to stay with my grandparents, and the car broke down, so we went by train instead!
It felt like such an adventure, a real treat to have some 1-1 time with my dad when he wasn’t distracted by motorway driving, and when we could share a train picnic and chat together. I must have travelled between Liverpool and Sheffield by car hundreds of times, but it is that train journey which still stands out as a happy memory over 30 years later.
My mum doesn’t drive, so if I went somewhere with her when my dad was at work then it was by bus or train, and this was also exciting. As I got to be old enough to go places with my friends there was nothing like the buzz of buying a day pass on a Saturday morning and knowing I had the freedom of all the buses, trains and ferries on Merseyside at my disposal! Ok, so we normally just got the bus into town, bought a new nail varnish, browsed the clothes we couldn’t afford in Topshop, had a Burger King spicy bean burger for lunch and then went down to the area outside the law courts to watch the cute boys skateboarding, but I loved the potential of that piece of cardboard in my pocket.
Girls on a train
We are harnessing that feeling of potential and possibility with our #CarFreeApril – a whole month of mini celebrations of car-free living.
We have put together a calendar of experiences which we have been told people feel would be difficult to do car-free, and each day we will share a prompt, challenging people to give one of them a go car-free.
Car-free trip to the beach
If you went car-free for all those experiences you would save a whopping 108,000g of carbon emission as well as improving the air quality where you live.
But we don’t want it to be miserable.
It is a celebration of how much fun carfree living can be. How you see your neighbourhood differently. How a mundane chore like taking your kids to get their feet measured can be a mini-adventure. How there is a whole world of possibility out there when you walk or cycle or take public transport.
We will be sharing the prompts across our social media platforms – Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and asking people to share their experiences with the hashtag #CarFreeApril so make sure you are following us to join in.
We can’t wait to see how everyone gets on!
