Every year, September 22 marks World Car-Free Day, an event that aims to promote cleaner air, safer streets and a shift toward more sustainable urban living. Cities worldwide are closing streets to vehicles to encourage drivers to give up their cars for a day and opt for alternative modes of transportation like walking, cycling, and public transit.
This day highlights the environmental and health benefits of reducing car use, with many cities reporting significant decreases in air and noise pollution. The event also promotes a sense of community, encouraging people to engage with their surroundings and with others, as they usually cannot when cars dominate the streets.
In fact, major cities such as Paris, London, Bogotá and New York are participating, not only by transforming car-dense streets into pedestrian-friendly zones, but also by organising events in neighbourhoods and activities to enhance streets that are normally dominated by cars.
In Paris, the iconic Champs-Élysées has been pedestrianised for the day, while Bogotá, a pioneer of the car-free movement, has opened hundreds of kilometres of streets to walkers and cyclists. In the meantime, in London, the Mayor wishes to mark World Car Free Day 2024 through the activation of play streets across the city, closing residential roads to vehicular traffic, creating safe spaces for children to play freely on their local roads and new opportunities for people of all ages to walk, cycle, and build meaningful relationships in their local community.
As cities face the growing challenges of change in particular due to climate change, since cities heat up more than rural areas because of the so-called urban heat island effect. To detect cool and hot places within a city, meteoblue offers urban heat maps, which detect hot and cool places within a city. Architects and city planners use this data to prepare climate change adaptation measures. meteoblue participated in several research projects such as:
- In a road pavement experiment in Basel (Switzerland)the road was painted white because light-coloured surfaces reflect the sun's incoming shortwave radiation more strongly than dark surfaces and, therefore, heat up less.
- De-sealing project in Basel (Switzerland), where air temperatures before and after the de-sealing project were measured. During the project, the pavement was removed in favour of trees.
- Citizen-science project in Krefeld, where citizens use small measurement devices on their bikes to track temperatures within the city to get additional data to train the city’s climate model.
Such projects help to validate climate change mitigations within cities and to find the right measures to stop temperatures in the city from increasing further. Removing or reducing cars in a city is another approach to fight climate change in a city.
World Car-Free Day offers a glimpse of a future where streets prioritise people over cars, pushing the conversation on long-term sustainable urban planning.
