Focus of work
Going Car Free will be back for another year! Possible will support a cohort of regular urban drivers in Oxford to trial going car free. They will use their stories – in the form of videos, photos and voice notes – to promote a public “going car free” month to encourage more people to go car free right now, and campaign for structural change in cities so that more people can go car free in the future. This will further build on Possible’s Going Car Free 2022 project which saw 1000 people participate.
Impact
The project will follow 10 regular drivers in Oxford and monitor their existing car use for 7 days, and then support them as they try to go car-free for 21 days through paying for their time, providing travel logs to capture quantitative data about their journeys, helping them document their experiences via photos, videos and voice notes, securing offers and prizes from more sustainable transport providers, providing one-to-one guidance and journey planning, and facilitating peer-to-peer support within the cohort. Possible expects a few participants will sell their cars off the back of their experiences, and almost all participants will reduce their car use beyond the trial. They will then use the travel logs and recordings from the trial to produce content, and secure stories in local and national press, to advertise a public Going Car Free (GCF) challenge. Possible will launch the GCF challenge and aim to have thousands of participants across the UK. They will host an online event for councillors to present the challenges of, and solutions to, car use in their constituencies using the participants’ experiences. They will call on participants to lobby their councils with a write-to-councillor tool.