Released on November 26, Car Busters Magazine 18 features include "Carfree Housing" (A look at new carfree housing project in Europe), "Autostop" (A proposal by Jean Robert and the late Ivan Illich), "Hanging with David Cerny" (Czech artist addresses car culture), reviews of World Carfree Day, and our regular sections: Letters, Car Cult Review, Industry Watch, World News, Action!, Studies & Reports, Book Reviews, and Announcements.

Only summaries of articles are published immediately on the web. Three months after the magazine's release date, the complete texts are added to our on-line magazine archive. You can subscribe to our magazine or buy a single copy online via credit card or by filling out a subscription form and sending it in with cash or a check.

Contents

Feature Articles

Building Carfree Housing

Our cities have not always been at the mercy of cars. This may be obvious to most people, but the current state of most modern cities - no matter whether in Europe, America, Africa or Asia - makes it hard to imagine that it once was different. Streets were narrow, people lived and worked in one neighbourhood, and almost you everything you needed was within walking distance.

Some of these cities are still with us, such as central Venice or some of the Italian hill towns - places where (thanks to geography) it has been near to impossible to accommodate cars. And, of course, many European cities have created carfree zones in historic centres once given over to cars.

Most cities, however, have been losing the battle, as the car takes over more and more urban space. You can find them parked on sidewalks and in public squares which previously served as centres of neighbourhood activity. Today, they are ruining former promenades and boulevards with their noise and stench.

Sidewalks have been narrowed, barriers erected to keep pedestrians from crossing streets, underpasses dug and overpasses built, all to accomodate the car. In many cities, a viscious circle of urban decay has taken hold: people have become more mobile and walk less, so they have less contact with their neighbourhood. As people pay less attention, the neighbourhood begins to decay, with shops closing as people drive to supermarkets, trash piling up, and crime spreading as the streets are abandoned. The more the neighbourhoods decay, the less people want to walk through them; the more they drive, the less they care, the more the neighbourhoods fall apart. Call it automotive detachment.

Fighting what seems to many people a "natural" process is an uphill battle. But carfree cities are still possible. Around the world, from San Francisco to Freiburg, Germany, advocates are trying to make cities walkable again by encouraging people to live carfree. In an era when many new housing projects inherently count on their residents wanting to own cars, there are people designing housing specifically to appeal to people who have renounced their cars.

Carfree Housing Today

Most housing built before the 1920s was carfree. If you chose to own a car, you had to park on the street, which became more and more difficult as everyone else wanted a car, too. Today, it is almost standard in Western Europe and North America that any new housing includes offstreet parking so residents don't need to worry about finding a parking spot, moving the car on street cleaning days, or having their radio stolen.

Many cities even require that new housing include offstreet parking, usually one garage space for every unit of housing. They are the bane of carfree activists. Cities enacted these laws in response to parking problems facing urban neighbourhoods, but the end effect has been to encourage car use. There is no incentive to not own a car, because you end up paying for your parking space even if you do not use it.

The easier something is, the more people want to do it. The problem is that we can build all the garages we want, but once all the cars hit the street, there's nothing but traffic jams, noise, and pollution. Especially in older cities, encouraging car use makes little sense. So it is time once again to build housing that does not include cars. Slowly, some cities are beginning to realise this need.

What Does "Carfree" Mean?

Before we talk about some various carfree projects being carried out today, we should define the term "carfree." While at first this may seem like a simple question, there are some competing definitions. The most pure (puritan?) carfree activist would say that carfree simply means no cars, period. Reality is, of course, always different from theory. Compromises usually have to be made if anything approaching "carfree" is to be built.

Markus Heller, a Berlin architect who runs the Autofrei-wohnen.de website and is currently develop-ing a project for central Berlin, divides carfree housing into three categories. First, there are projects that merely move parking to the edge of the develop-ment. While the housing is therefore technically carfree ("optically carfree," as Heller puts it), they are not carfree in the true sense of the word.

Second, "car-lite" projects incorporate a mixture of carfree and non carfree households, but give carfree inhabitants all the financial benefits of not owning a car - lower rent/purchase price made possible by not having to pay for the development of parking spaces. These are usually the result of compromise, as city governments are often hesitant to approve a new project without any off-street parking.

Finally, there are carfree developments. Even these, however, often allow for some cars - a carsharing vehicle, visitors, and deliveries or emergency vehicles. These compromises seem almost unavoidable in order to get city approval for a project.

IG Seebucht, a nonprofit which is planning a carfree housing project in the Swiss city of Nidau, uses the following definitions: Carfree (0.1 to 0.2 parking spaces per household, no cars allowed in actual housing area, deliveries and emergencies only), car-lite (0.5 spaces per household, cars allowed on local streets only when driving to parking spot), and traffic calming (standard number of parking spots, cars theoretically allowed on all streets, but access limited).

Off-street parking requirements can add up to US$30,000 per unit of housing, which could buy a lot of bus passes (or car rentals, if you really think you need one for a weekend getaway). So a lot of the debate around carfree housing revolves around these parking requirements, especially when it comes to infill devlopments where new housing is built among older (already carfree) housing. Smart growth activists in the United States have begun to argue for exempting certain housing (for instance near transit) from parking requirements. This has the added benefit of making housing attainable for working families who may not be able to afford a car anyway.

The United Kingdom

Some city governments in the United Kingdom have decided that it is not in their interest to encourage more automobile use. Through developer incentives and legislation, they are trying to encourage private investment in carfree housing developments.

The most prominent example of carfree housing in the United Kingdom (and one of Europe's earliest) is Edinburgh's Slateford Green. Completed in 2000, Slateford Green was built by a private developer and offers 120 apartment units, both rental and owner-occupied, on a former railway yard. There are no parking spaces on the site itself, but no restrictions on car ownership and plenty of offstreet parking in the surrounding neighbourhood. Slateford Green fits well into the existing neighbourhood, there is easy access to public transport, it is not too far (3.5 kilometres) from the centre, and primary and secondary schools are within easy walking distance. These are all factors needed to promote walking.

A study carried out in September/October 2000 by Jan Scheurer of Australia's Murdoch University found that almost three-fourths of residents did not own any form of motorised transport, although most tended do so out of necessity or a sense of convenience, not because they believed in carfree living. Indeed, car ownership has decreased over time, as some residents who had been parking on the surrounding streets decided they didn't need a car after all.

Some drawbacks include the fact that residents need not commit to living carfree. Although no cars are allowed on the site itself, in reality this means that the carfree area is limited to the courtyard created by the buildings' horse-shoe layout. The surrounding streets continue to be the realm of cars. Also, common outdoor areas, although used by children, were not frequented much by the adults living there, and the general sense of community, according to the study, was quite low. Still, Slateford Green is a prime example that people will choose to live carfree if given the option, and that such developments can be built by private developers.

Another, more visionary project is underway in London's Camden district, also sponsored by the local council. Since 1997, Camden has encouraged developers to build new housing without parking, except for disabled people. Specifically, such housing is encouraged in areas with good access to public transit, with shopping and other amenities within walking distance and which have controlled parking (on-street parking permit required). Residents are not eligible for on-street parking permits, meaning that people who choose to live there will either knowingly give up on owning a car or have to endure extreme inconveniences if they do own one. So far, 2 000 such housing units (in 175 projects) have been approved.

The carfree housing developments in Camden, like the one in Edinburgh, are being carried out primarily by private developers, with some extra nudging from government officials. There is anecdotal evidence, as shown by Scheurer's study, that residents do not have a "carfree mindset" but rather live carfree because they have to, for example for economic reasons.

Another model for carfree housing, one in which government plays a role but where usually a group of determined and idealistic individuals initiate the project, can be found in Germany. Here, we also find the most ambitious carfree development yet to be developed.

Building a Carfree Life

While Slateford Green and Camden prove that private developers can provide carfree housing, one must look to the German-speaking world to find more a "holistic" approach. Here, the trend is for people interested in living carfree to form co-operatives that plan, design, build and operate carfree developments themselves. Participants here often believe in a carfree lifestyle in principle and are looking to put their ideals into practice. Their goal is not just to save money by not owning a car, but to build a sense of community and care for the environment.

Munich

A first step involves the establishment of a non-profit organisation to bring together interested people. In Munich, the group "Wohnen ohne Auto" (Living without a car) was formed to lobby the city for the inclusion of carfree housing in a larger development that was turning a former airport into a whole new city neighbourhood. The project, known as "Messestadt Riem," consists of an entire new city of 16,000 residents located on the grounds of the decommissioned Riem Airport. Carfree proponents had hoped to encourage the city to designate much of the new urban district carfree. In the end, they were able to gain permission to build their own carfree housing in the area (though their several dozen units represent only a fraction of overall housing). Once the project gained momentum, a Bauherrengemeinschaft (construction cooperative), composed of the individuals or families who would be living carfree, was set up to build the actual housing.

One obvious advantage to this arrangement is that a group of people who plan such a large project together, even if they didn't know each other before, create an instant community.

But the cooperative approach isn't without its problems. According to Maria Ernst of Wohnen ohne Auto, the group faced setbacks when members left for financial reasons or because the project wasn't moving fast enough. The co-operative also faced difficulties receiving bank loans.

The WEG housing cooperative completed one project (Autofrei Wohen 1, with 14 units) in September 1999. Phase two (Autofrei Wohnen 2) is currently in the planning stages, and is being built by an association of ten families. Another cooperative housing association, WOGENO, received permission to build 28 units, which were completed in late 2000.

Freiburg - Sustainable City

"Fewer cars means a higher quality of life," says Hannes Linck of Freiburg, Germany. He should know, he lives in Germany's largest carfree community - a neighbourhood of 3,000 people of whom half do not own cars.

Freiburg is probably Germany's greenest city, politically speaking. Its mayor is a Green Party member, as is more than one fifth of the city council. Since the 1970s, the city of Freiburg has gradually removed all cars from its centre. So it should come as little surprise that Freiburg would be home to an ambitious urban redevelopment project that, when finished, will include carfree housing, in one form or another, for several thousand people.

The Vauban project, referred to as a "sustain-able urban district," is being built on 218 km2 of a former army barracks located about three km from the centre of Freiburg. Already, 3,000 people live in Vauban. When completed sometime after 2006, the new urban district will be home to 5,000 people, 6,000 jobs, and be connected to the centre with a new tram line. It's a ten-minute bicycle ride to town.

Vauban's carfree character exists on two levels. First, there is no resident parking over the entire area of the project, with parking limited to a parking garage on the perimeter. The aim is to reduce the number of cars driving through the pro-ject area and make the neighbourhood a true community safe for child-ren to play and pleasant for people to walk around. The cost for parking spaces is calculated separately, at up to 30,000 eur per car.

Secondly, a carfree association has been set up to encourage residents to not own a car in the first place. Members must sign a contract before being given a waiver from having to provide one parking spot for each unit of housing. About 50% of all housing is carfree.

There are problems of course, with some residents not respecting rules against parking on residential streets or others secretly owning cars although they are benefiting from not paying for parking. It is estimated that 10% of residents are "cheating."

These problems still need to be resolved, but in general, Vauban is a mixed car-lite/carfree project in which all residents benefit from the fact that cars are parked on the edge of the development, with additional benefits (mostly financial) for people who commit to not owning a car at all. It is a radical idea to put into practice.

Putting the Plan into Action

"Even in the 'eco-capital' of Freiburg, there were strong forces that opposed such a project," says Linck, who lives in Vauban with his wife and two children and acts as carfree coordinator Vauban's carfree club. However, a slim majority on the city council voted in favour of the proposal. One goal of the city was to encourage young families with children to settle within the city limits, in order to counter the suburban flight leading to increased car commutes and a decreased sense of community within the old cities.

Large properties (such as the airport in Munich, the former stadium in Berlin, or the former barracks in Freiburg) or brownfields (such as the former railway yard in Edinburgh) are often city-owned, so a decision by city or governmental authorities can make or break a carfree development. Berlin's Markus Heller was able to find a Berlin senate receptable to the idea of carfree housing on city property, but the project may still fall apart because of federal government involvement (see sidebar on carfree housing).

Carfree housing is not just for idealists, as the many very real and successful projects show. The British examples show that it can be attractive even for people who are not looking for a carfree solution. And, as the people in Germany discovered, if you want to create more than just a house, but a sense of community, you'll find many like-minded people. In Munich, both WEG and WOGENO have many more members than housing units built, and there is a waiting list to get into the housing already built or for new housing being planned. And the idea is spreading.

In Switzerland, Bern's IG Autofreies Viererfeld has 300 members although its project hasn't come off the drawing board. There are no carfree projects in their country yet, but the Swiss group is confident: There are so many advantages to living carfree, they say on their homepage, that these projects are "springing up like mushrooms."

by Stephan von Pohl

Autostop

The following text was presented by Jean Robert and the late Ivan Illich to a symposium on bicycle freedoms in Berlin, Summer 1992. Twelve years later it continues to be relevant. Robert expands on its placement within society and Illich's work:

"Autostop is the 'remedial' complement of 'Energy and Equity.' What does that mean? 'Energy and Equity' is radical in the sense that it goes to the root of the predicament of a society that hampers its members' autonomy by offering them compulsory crutches and paralyses their imagination with unrealistic expectations.

"On the other hand, 'Autostop' takes car-invaded cities as they are and first proposes a reflection on the use of public space. In an industrial city, every car requires on the average the same surface as an apartment for a family of five (about 120 square meters for roads, the 'body-shop' and home, job and market parking). Cars privatise public space. This is the spirit of the proposal: Make the space occupied by cars public again."

We want to tell a story that reflects some nonsense about our way of life, and that story is about traffic. We tell the story because we believe that tomorrow morning all could live in a more quiet and perhaps even bicycle-centered society if only people believed that modesty can guide political choice.

Reasoning shows that transport can enhance freedom of movement only within the limits in which one can renounce it. Today, such renunciation is barely viable in a society where the traffic jam has become paradigmatic for all kinds of consumption. Transportation, public or private, carries inevitable consequences. Beyond a certain threshold, it diminishes personal mobility in proportion to more passenger miles generated. Thus transportation is a monument to the basic experience of the age. The more refined and more integrated the transporation system, the more we live in a society of morning joggers tied down during the rest of the day.

Starting with this insight, we invite you to a mental experiment. By limiting the compulsory auto-disempowerment produced by transportation, a society can increase the freedom of movement enjoyed on foot or bicycle.

Not so long ago, everyone knew that the world was accessible for free. Until quite recently, the poor knew that most places of his valley lay within the reach of his feet. People could go unhampered where they wanted and they experienced the world with their own senses. And for several decades now, U.S. border guards have admitted their helplessness as they are overrun by auto-mobile transgressors - moving on foot.

In the 1950s, Mexico City was already a metropolis of nearly three million inhabitants, with some 40 plazas containing popular markets. Most of these markets were on the same spot where Cortez had found them 450 years earlier. In any given week, less than one out of every hundred persons moved beyond the border of their respective barrio. Since then, the population of the city has increased seven-fold. Engineered traffic patterns tear neighborhoods apart; multi-lane, one-way throughways separate people into artificial ghettoes; a high proportion of the population is the boxed-up victim of daily, long-range transport - there is an efficient subway. Such transport encloses students as well as pensioners, employees as much as women needing pre-natal tests. Five million persons - according to official count - must travel daily to reach inaccessible places.

Historically, walking was never an act of pure leisure. At times, it could be dangerous, painful, disappointing, but at other times adventuresome, enjoyable or exhilarating. But that is not the issue. What counts is that using one's feet came at no cost. Of course, everyone had to find the pennies to pay the ferryman. A mule or carriage were confined to the rich. Generalised mobility was enhanced by social virtue: tolerance of the outsider, hospitality, charity and conviviality at resting places. For the majority, these were more important than inns. People lived in the experience that the place on which they stood was a place they had reached with their feet.

We would like to ask a question: What does it mean that so very little of that which enabled and graced freedom came in the nature of a commodity? Now modern engineers claim that feet are underdeveloped means of self-transportation! Indeed, what equipped our forefathers was inexpensive, from staff and sandals to cloak and sack; later, the bicycle. Distances, when they were counted, were measured in days; they were perceived as life time, not as watch time. There was nothing like the concept of a passenger mile on land until the postal coach appeared, late in the 18th century; and then the railroad in the early 19th.

The railroad created the minute and the fare that measured the time cost of bridging passenger miles. These concepts are basic and acquire full validity with motorised traffic. Only on the basis of such assumptions could the locomotion of human beings be made into a commodity. And this commodity - traffic - was produced by employed workers, whether railroad men or chauffeurs, proto-passengers making up the consumers. All this changed with Henry Ford's Model T. This innovation brought the news that mobility would be an industrial product to be enjoyed only through unpaid labour. Each employee now had the "privilege" of purchasing a car. With this investment, he had to deliver his own work force to the factory door. For many, then, the car became the condition for selling themselves on the labour market, to purchase household needs, to educate their kids, to visit their aged parents.

For 25 years we have reflected on transportation because we see in it an Ideal Type of post-industrial commodities: a synthesis of installment payments, operating costs, insurance premiums, and unpaid labor to make the investment actually useful. Shadow work - the unpaid, time-consuming, disciplined, risky improvement of a commodity to make it pay - became a foundation of modern existence. It is quite surprising how completely this self-enslavement has remained a blind spot among the first two generations of car owners. But we now see that a powerful spell has been cast over them. A mixture of fashion, vanity, commodity fetishism, and greed sharpened by clever, no-holds-barred advertising created the fantasy of the automobile as a liberator - from schedules, waiting lines, limited horizons, pre-established routes. For most of those born before 1970, the auto is still an enticing symbol of personal freedom through an industrial product. But for a later generation, this is a transparent oxymoron. Rarely does one find the distance between two generations so great.

Now let us come to our story. And the reader can decide whether it is a serious project or a cautionary tale. The story begins with a judgment, one passed down by the Supreme Court. According to the Court, the use of tax-supported roads shall be limited to vehicles in public service. In effect, this means that every car with a free seat must stop when asked. To implement the decision, Congress passes a law that restricts licenses to drivers who produce passenger-miles and earn income by doing so. No Samaritans needed. Henceforth everyone who is not a driver will be chauffeured, and all drivers are available as chauffeurs.

Is the unthinkable feasible? Can a simple judicial judgment turn the way we now think about economic "goods" topsy-turvy? Without any technical innovation, can a society transform its social and physical environment? Can a small change in the character of transportation lead to a moral reevaluation of place?

How can we imagine the details? Every citizen receives a Hack-Card. If a would-be passenger signals a passing car with an empty seat, the driver must stop. The car contains a computer with as many slots as there are seats. For the construction of the black box, ways of billing the patrons and paying the drivers, Toshiba and the IRS are obviously competent. Or let Sprint instruct highway departments on the management of channels (they have experience following the court decision on the monopoly formerly enjoyed by Bell Telephone).

Let charges be entered on one's tax return (which could make travel cheap and/or free for those with limited incomes) or let them be sent out like the phone bill today. Place regular waiting stops where people signal their direction, and where every passing car with an empty seat must stop if hailed. Make them cozy or warm on lonely corners, and shade them where the sun beats down. Let the people themselves police their waiting lines, as they have learned to do gently in Havana or Mexico. They can report any vehicle that runs a stop. If muggers are rampant in the area, what better place to be but in a car, with one's HackCard signaling the whereabouts for the police?

For those who see a project here, there are many practical questions to be examined. For example: How much would traffic accelerate by eliminating tie-ups? How much space would be created for pedestrians and bikes? How many would renounce transportation, and when? And who would finally be able to afford it? How many new jobs would be created for drivers as against those lost in the car industry? What social consequences would result from discontinuing company and government fleet cars? Could one limit the privilege of the policeman to step ahead in line when in uniform? What would be the ecological impact? And would such a decision accelerate the transition to less polluting vehicles?

How much would be saved in public investments? How quickly could this saving create the funds to cover the societal "loss" through fewer cars being manufactured, purchased and driven? How can we face taxi driver unions when they try to challenge the Supreme Court decision? How can we tell a better story to open up "the sociological imagination"?

If this is just a cautionary tale, why do we have the experience of people getting angry when we tell it? Are they angry because we do not propose a new technology? Nor defend an ideology? This seems but a simple proposal for thoughtful consideration.

The Great Debate: Critical Mass

Three activists take on the tactics of the infamous urban ride

Critical Mass began in San Francisco in 1992. Famous for having no central organisation, no appointed ride leaders, and no planned routes, it operates by a kind of nebulous consensus. Cyclists meet monthly at a regular place and time, usually during evening rush hour, using the strength of their numbers to reclaim streets where normally cars dominate.

The following debate addresses the tactics, aims and goals of Critical Mass from both the moderate and confrontational perspective.

Rob Zverina, Seattle/Prague

What are the goals of Critical Mass?
  1. to portray bicycling as an attractive alternative to motor vehicles;
  2. to demonstrate the political strength of a city's cycling population; and
  3. to attract favourable attention to the needs of urban cyclists.

    In discussing these three goals, I offer examples from personal experience of what I've seen that worked, didn't work, and why.

    Bike riding is clean, efficient, and fun. Cyclists know this. But it can also be something of an acquired taste, especially in areas which are car-centric. A dour, accusing fundamentalism won't win any converts. Drawing battle lines between drivers and riders is self-defeating.

    Someone stuck behind the wheel of a car, on their way to their suburban isolation box after a day of solitary drudgery in a fuzzy cube is ripe for an invitation to join a community. Smile, wave, communicate. Thank them for their patience, hand them a flier with information about the next ride. Maybe they have a bike gathering dust in the garage.

    By viewing drivers as potential allies, not sworn enemies, the ride could grow, behaviour might change. The way to do that is by having fun and showing it through acts of kindness, humour and generosity.

    For example, riders in San Francisco, when stopping cross-traffic at intersections so the ride can pass unbroken, hold up signs which say, "Thank You for Waiting." If drivers become impatient anyway and start honking, the sign is turned around to show, "Honk if You Love Bicycles."

    Negative Example from Seattle Critical Mass: Playing chicken with oncoming traffic. Oh my, how radical. But ask yourself, are your actions consistent with your goals? Are you on this ride because you want to assert your right to the road, or the right to endanger yourself and others? If it's the latter, you're never going to get it, so please stay home.

    A recurring event such as a monthly bike ride, to be successful as a political force, needs to grow over time. Disruptive actions might draw a blip of attention, but it will be negative attention that won't win over many converts or clarify the issues, and might give the powers that be an excuse not to listen. As the ride grows, it becomes a political base from which support can be drawn to petition for improved cycling infra- structure - lanes, racks, shelters - as well as mobilising for related action such as better mass transit, greenways, and other considerations to lessen car-centric urban planning.

    Negative example from Prague: On September 18, Prague's Critical Mass effectively took over the Magistral, the three-lane highway which bisects the city (pictured opposite). No doubt it's a giddy sensation to shut down a city's major highway, but ultimately it seems an error in tactics. Overhead photos show a large but rather diffuse group. Was it necessary to take all three lanes and willfully obstruct traffic? Is that going to change people's behaviour? Or will it draw battle lines, make the perception of bicyclists less favourable? The point would have been as eloquently made by taking the two right lanes but allowing cars to squeak by on the left. More people would thus have been given an opportunity to see what was happening, and the frustration they felt would have been mitigated by the unusual and inspiring sight of a long, dense column of bikes. Instead, the police had no choice but to intervene (how many angry phone calls do you think they got?), and from now on they'll be prepared to "manage" future rides, which it seems likely will also discourage more law-abiding riders from attending.

    Positive example from Seattle: On a cross-city carfree day ride, the decision was made to use only one lane of a major two-lane thoroughfare. The pack was dense and cars had ample room to pass on the left. Although delayed by the bottleneck, there was no honking, no frustration, and most drivers and their passengers were delighted by the sight, smiled and waved. He who shares the right of way, creates more cyclists the very next day.

    Ultimately, the power of group rides lies in sheer number, not in acts of derring-do and disruption, so everything should be done to grow the size of the ride, which to my mind means making them appealing to the moderate majority. When riders emphasise the creative and socially conscious aspects of bike culture, public perception and media coverage likewise accentuates the positive.

    They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but favourable, positive press coverage which high- lights the positive aspects of an event is ultimately more beneficial than news of arrests, which portrays urban biking as something radical and dangerous.

    The biggest threat to Critical Mass is self-righteousness. To simply portray drivers as bad, to view them as the enemy, to scorn their lack of self-determination, their laziness, to see them as fundamentally malevolent is to be guilty of a lack of imagination and sympathy. Everyone reading this magazine understands that cars are isolating and dehumanising, but to view the struggle as bikes versus cars is to succumb to a reductive fallacy. We are all just people trying to make the best choices, and it seems mass and like rides are most effective when they strive to connect people with people rather than perpetuate an us-versus-them mentality.

    Martin Luther King wrote: "When hate fights hate, hate wins." Bicyclists may feel a lot of frustration - pollution, lack of access, dangerous traffic conditions - but to fight these feelings of frustration by creating more frustration is a losing proposition.

    Ruth Oskolkoff, Seattle

    In looking at the subject of whether to assertively confront during Critical Mass events, I see a larger question emerge. The underlying principles, beliefs and habits of the car-centric must change on a large scale if the world is to move away from automobile dependence. The question then becomes, how can the foundational principles of Critical Mass, and the larger issue of being carfree be disseminated, transforming large groups of individuals?

    I agree bike riding is clean, efficient and fun and that, "a dour, accusing fundamentalism won't win any converts." However, neither will the opposite. A passive message does nothing to chall-enge a car-dependent individual's philosophy. The problem is that acts of kindness, humour, and generosity, more often than not, do not change individuals or collective consciousness. These positive feelings simply make people satisfied with their own lives, and do not lead to introspection, or change on an individual or group level. Change often comes as a result of discomfort and challenge.

    Yet, what are the practical and useful ways in which to confront society? It is counterproductive to endanger oneself by playing chicken with traffic. It also shows the cause in a negative light and if I had to choose between the way of harmony, smiles and waving, or playing chicken, I would choose the former. But however positive we portray ourselves as cyclists, the infrastructure and the slant of the vast corporations that keep the infrastructure going stays the same.

    If all that most people feel about bikers is "ah, what charming, quaint people," we will continue to have our nice rides, and small alleys for an occasional carfree day. Not wanting to criticise and confront is something we need to get over to bring a change of consciousness. We need to bring a lot of small messages to society that show why it is not okay to live a car-centric lifestyle. If the average person is witness to enough of this, they may begin to feel something amiss about the lifestyle. Only then will they be willing to look at changing it.

    I agree that condemning people is counterproductive, yet is the opposite way of fitting in with the infrastructure and always working with the system the real way to go? I participated in Seattle's carfree day last year. Although it felt good, no one I knew at work even realised there was a carfree day. Aside from the people participating, and a few small articles in the press, there was minimal impact.

    I believe that the willingness to cooperate is among the highest human ideals, but I also believe that the willingness to confront intelligently for the sake of the good of humanity is also important. Some negative examples should not discourage bikers from taking bold action; rather, they should show how vital it is to take well thought-out action. Breaking the law and taking up all the lanes may be counter-productive, but does that mean there should be no message in the rides, no confrontation either in wording, signage, clothing, or group behaviour?

    Is there no way to shock, to confront deeply held beliefs, while still abiding by the rules of the road and avoiding physical harm? Through the effort of all of us, we can invade the popular media through news, events, and artistic effort. I believe this is the only avenue to steer humanity away from the corporate patterns, closer to natural human patterns of living.

    Is your part of the world moving away from automobile dependence? Maybe we as a collective need to look at tactics which may not be as liked, which may even be unpleasant, but that forcefully challenge peoples underlying beliefs that lead to a car-centric lifestyle. This change will not come about by smiling and waving, but by being like Socrates, the buzzing annoying gadfly to the comfortable grazing animals.

    Vojtech Toman, Prague

    I understand what Rob is saying in his article but some of his opinions seem to be a bit naive. I also realise that there are some differences between the American and Czech situations. Rob is absolutely right when he advises us to make Critical Masses more fun. Drivers cannot be our enemies; we need to communicate more.

    But I don't believe that people will change their thinking and behaviour only because they see a large group of cyclists. It is more realistic and efficient to focus on causes. We have to change the minds of our local politicians. I work for a non-profit organisation as a volunteer. We want to improve cycling infrastructure (lanes, racks, etc.) in Prague because our city seems to be more car-friendly than bike-friendly. We are trying to persuade city councillors that cycling should be supported. I am a member of the city hall working group for bicycle transport, too. Lobbying is very important, but we also need to form some public pressure. For me the main role of Critical Mass is to create such pressure and that is why we need publicity.

    Rob has criticised Prague's September 18 Critical Mass when we slowed down the traffic on the main highway, the Magistral, by taking up all three lanes. He has suggested that we should have left the left lane free to allow cars to pass by. This is very dangerous because there is high risk of an accident when cars squeak by a group of cyclists, especially in Prague where many drivers seem to be insane and dangerous. And, I must remind our readers of the motto of Critical Mass: "We are not blocking traffic, we are traffic."

    This Critical Mass had surprisingly positive coverage in one Prague newspaper, along with an overhead photo of the large group of cyclists in front of the traffic jam. Without this jam probably no journalist would have been interested. It is sad, but true. Rob also mentioned the problems with police, but I have to say that most of the police officers support us because they have many problems with undisciplined drivers. They are doing their job and have to check up every unusual situation. A large group of cyclists is (unfortunately!) such a situation. Many of them asked us for information fliers and then they followed us in two cars to our destination, when they again expressed their support with the words "we are not against you, we are with you."

    At the Speed of Futurism

    War, Machines and Ideas that Kill

    Ecologists getting you down? Looking for a speed fix? Look no further than the Futurists. This group of Italian agitators, artists and, sometimes, fascists, with their fiery prose and obsession with machines and mobility, might make you want to trade in that rusty bike for a shiny, new tank. Make way for F.T. Marinetti, founder of Futurism and public relations man extraordinaire! In their many manifestoes thrust onto the masses, the futurists aestheticise their own destruction in their love for the technological war machines. They are perfect advertisements for a world gone mad. Nevertheless, now, when the internet and email are used by activists and corporate elite alike, the Futurists are a reminder of the intimate connections between modern technologies and the war machine and to embrace one and not the other borders on hypocrisy. The following “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” written by Marinetti, was published in Le Figaro, a French newspaper, in 1909:

    We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach. The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathematics of our perishing eyes...

    On we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.

    “Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!”

    The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way – Damn! Ouch!... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air...

    O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse... When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!

    A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort. They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!

    And so, faces smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot – we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:

    1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
    2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
    3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
    4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
    5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
    6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
    7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
    8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
    9. We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
    10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
    11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

    Hanging with David Černý

    David Černý, the creator of Quo Vadis, the sculpture featured on both the front and back covers of this magazine, blazes with all the colours of controversy. His internationally known work, which always carefully attends to the absurd, provokes and intrigues. In 1991, he painted the Soviet War Memorial tank pink. Yet it was his strange and creative use of the car in his work (including a pink car that emits the sound of two people having sex) that prompted Car Busters to contact him. Step into David Černý’s world and discover why a car is never just a car.

    It is in Černý’s world where the car becomes a sex machine or is transformed into a piece of meat on the artist’s slab. It is in that world where the preferred method of transportation is an 18-year-old pair of roller skates. With movements fit for a figure skating star, Černý rolled into the September Critical Mass in Prague.

    He was at Critical Mass because he sees that Prague is full of cars and, “city hall does not, in any way, try to reduce [them]; [rather] they amplify the problem. They are saying that we need to have more concrete and highways around the city.”

    “The government is also saying that having more tunnels in the city is an important thing,” he adds, “which is bullshit, of course. If you build a road, in a while it is going to be full of cars.”

    “I don’t think there is a way to avoid cars,” he continues. “The issue is if we make wider streets they will be filled with cars because people are less and less responsible and more and more lazy. Why walk when you can drive?”

    Černý points out that he is not against the car itself. “If I want to go to Berlin it is a good idea. The bad idea is how people use it.”

    “I was living in New York city for three years and I didn’t know anybody with a car. I am against the cars in the city.” Although Černý admits he owned a car, it was stolen a few days before our interview.

    Yet the presence of cars not only alters the physical world, it assumes a dominant presence in the symbolic landscape. During Communism, cars from the German Democratic Republic, especially the infamous East German Trabant, exerted a huge influence on Czechs. Although these cars were nothing to brag to friends about, many people had one.

    This prompted Černý to create Quo Vadis, a statue made from the Trabant car. He gave it legs and genitalia and displayed it on the eve of German currency union in 1991. The car is the foot soldier of consumerism, marching to the frontiers of unconquered lands.

    Černý evokes the religious symbolism of cars in a sculpture called, Meat. In the artists’ hands, the car is cut open and its mechanical innards fall to the floor. The result is a car hanging pinned to a wall with an iron stake driven through its back hood. "It looks like a piece of meat hanging on nail," says Černý. “The main point is about...a society which takes the car as a sacrificial and religious object,” he says. After Communism fell, says Černý, the car was on the top of people's wish lists. It was probably more important than anything else, he says, even religion.

    Although Quo Vadis stands in the courtyard of the German Embassy in Prague, Černý has been twice unsuccessful in exhibiting Meat outside the confines of the gallery. In the first instance, he found an ideal building, owned by the city, in the centre of Prague. The Minister of Culture agreed that he could hang the cars there. However, when the current tenant of the building, a friend of the Czech president, saw Černý’s name on the project, he immediately rejected the proposal.

    In the second instance he wanted to exhibit them by the entrance to the National Museum in Prague, but the director said no. “I thought that he might be afraid of something against cars at the National Museum or that it would be seen as being connected with advertising.”

    However, not long after World Carfree Day, if you strolled by the museum you would have seen a real car standing at the ramp leading to the entrance – another piece of advertising.

    In a consumer-oriented society driven by the ad and the car, it is not surprising that some of Černý's work has been ignored. Giant advertisements can cover the facades of Baroque buildings, but art cannot. Černý believes that this is indicative of a distorted sense of space in a big city like Prague. “People don't care about what is beyond their private spaces. If you go to cafes in Amsterdam they face the street. Here, the cafes are closed to the street.”

    Public space belongs to the people as well, he says, but the attitude that has survived from the days of Communism is that “what is outside my home is not mine and so I do not care about it. I don't belong to the street because it is dirty.”

    Hopefully, Černý will continue to make efforts to find a place for Meat so that we can have public visuals that are not simply advertising. And if you happen to be walking along the street of your town and spot a pink car emitting strange, erotic-like sounds, David Černý should be close by.