Scourge of "Car Free" Days Spreading

A few days ago I posted about the "car free" days planned for this summer in Manhattan, where a huge swatch of downtown will be closed to vehicle traffic and reserved instead for annoying folksy activities. It’s not a bad thing if you don’t mind dealing with swarms of wandering pedestrians clotting up the areas where cars should be, but I’d prefer that such activities not take place in my city. Too bad, because Seattle is planning "car free" street closings this summer too, in the interest of "letting people enjoy the streets in new and healthy ways." Just for the record, I live across the street from CarDomain so that I don’t have to use my cars for daily commuting, and I’m 100% in favor of helping the environment—but I believe that pushing already frazzled drivers to their boiling point by diverting them to sit in endless traffic jams so a few goody-two-shoes citizens can feel like they’re being "green" is absolutely NOT the way to do it. It’s annoying enough that there’s already frequent street closings every summer for obnoxious street festivals and questionable construction projects. And there’s no way that, on top of these, you should be reasonlessly forbidden from driving on the roads that your taxes pay for, whether it’s one weekend a month or one day a week—especially when you need to drive on those roads to access your home or operate your business. Between traffic, fuel costs, and other economic and population-related stresses, drivers in urban centers are already pretty jacked—the "car free" disruptions just seem to be a way of kicking them while they’re down, wasting gas, and displacing congestion (and pollution) to other parts of the city.

A key factor is that the "car free" disruptions in many cities are being billed as experimental—it’s only if they get widespread participation that they’ll be implemented permanently. So if you’d like to be able to continue driving your own car on your own roads, the course of action would probably be to boycott these events, and to get in touch with your local representatives to voice your opinion on the matter. How about you? Any "car free" days planned for your area?