Skip to main content

Drivers urged - leave your cars at home

Drivers are being urged to leave their motors at home as part of a car-free day.

As part of In Town Without My Car! day, an international festival of environmentally friendly transport, families are being encouraged to walk, cycle or catch the bus into Norwich city centre and local towns on Monday.

Ahead of the day, Norfolk County Council will hold a stand at the Forum tomorrow offering local travel information, maps and free travel plan advice.

People who make a sustainable travel pledge will receive a gift and be entered into a prize draw to win Park and Ride tickets, bicycle locks, bicycle lights and other goodies.

Stevie Spencer, the county council's smarter travel choices officer, said: "We will be on hand to offer advice to people who would like to reduce their car use and provide information on other ways they can get around."

As part of the scheme, drama group Stopwatch Theatre has been touring schools, putting on a production to encourage pupils to walk, cycle and use the bus wherever possible.

The idea of the scheme is to make drivers across Europe explore other means of travelling and to question what town centre streets are really for.

Ali Clabburn, managing director of Liftshare, the Attleborough-based car sharing company which also matches up cyclists and walkers, said: "In Town Without My Car! day is the perfect opportunity for people to get out of their cars."

Rupert Read, Green Party city councillor, said he hoped the initiative would have a long-lasting effect.

He said: "I have a car, but I use it as little as possible. I find that cycling as much as possible is the best way."

But he warned the day could be "a mere tokenistic gesture" unless people looked at the long term.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More on why 20's plenty -- without need for any further 'trials'...

There are a number of reasons for setting a default speed of 20mph throughout the 'unclassified' road network in residential parts of a city such as Norwich. Most important perhaps is that of driver recognition as to what the speed limit is. If you have 20 mph as the default then you not only establish this limit clearly, but you also adjust the driver's recognition as to what is the "normal" speed in such residential areas. The most important aspect is that drivers set 20 mph as the norm with those 30 mph areas or roads being seen as 50% faster, rather than seeing 30 mph as the norm with 20 mph as 33% slower. The psychological adjustment of normal speeds in residential areas is key to the success of reducing speeds and therefore danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore any trial, pilot or whatever, that only implements 20 mph in a tiny proportion of the city is not modelling 20's Plenty in any realistic manner.   When considering the val...

Stansted: a reflection

The key question, in relation to protsts like that at Stansted last week, is: which side are you on? Are you on the side of big corporations profiteering from completely unsustainable climate-destructive behaviour? Or are you on the side of people with no vested interests just making a non-violent stand, at considerable cost to their own time and money, for the sake of all our futures? It doesn't seem to me a hard judgement to make... Rupert Read Green Party Councillor, Norwich, and Lead Candidate for Eastern Region for the Greens in the 2009 Euro-elections. DID YOU KNOW: A vote of about 10% across Eastern Region on June 4 2009 would be enough to get me elected to the European Parliament... http://rupertsread.blogspot.com