Bacolod City has announced that it will have a “Car free Sunday”, for a few hours at least, from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., starting on June 9, on a portion of Lacson Street, its main thoroughfare.
According to its announcement made on Facebook, the city is promoting good air quality and raising public awareness on the benefits of walking, jogging, running and cycling as “substantial” ways to travel. I believe whoever wrote that bit meant sustainable instead, but substantial will probably work too.
Anyway, the announcement is for a one day, 4 hours only stint of no cars on a portion of Lacson Street, which sounds like a good start on paper. Nobody loses anything, because most of the car dependents won’t have gotten out of bed by 9am, and those who like to do the activities encouraged in the announcement will have started going back home by that time, as it will be getting quite hot by then. Aside from putting a few traffic enforcers and a moveable barricade on a few chokepoints, not much work is required from the city that can already score some pogi points for going “car free.”
The trouble with a trouble-free car free hours is that it doesn’t really change anything. Aside from a short detour that lasts four hours, during that time of week when there isn’t much traffic anyway, nothing really changes and no behaviors are challenged. Yes, people can take strolls along the main thoroughfare for a few hours, and that might encourage more of them to walk or bike more, but even if it is done once a week (which I hope it does, or it’s just a one-off gimmick), there’s not much to be learned or encouraged.
The difference between a gimmick, an experiment, and policy is duration and intent. A gimmick lasts hours and happens only every now and then, mostly for pogi points. An experiment could run for weeks, with the intention of changing the way things work and forming policies, which could end up becoming permanent if the desired results are achieved.
When it comes to going car free, Bacolod’s announcement for the four hours on June 9 sounds like a gimmick, at least for now, because it doesn’t seem like the city government is actually interested in converting a portion of its roads to become truly car free, similar to the successful transformation undertaken by the much bigger city of Paris.
To be fair to Bacolod, it doesn’t seem possible for any sort of car-free policy to be part of its future, as its leaders and policy makers, along with their target market voters, seem to be the totally car-centric type. All it has going for it is a willingness to launch a few gimmicks every now and then to make it sound like they care about going car free, under the guise of encouraging an active lifestyle and for the good of the environment.
It is tough to imagine having a city government bold and imaginative enough to reconfigure the entire length or a major portion of its main thoroughfare, Lacson Street, to accommodate people and bikes more than cars. It would be nice to see plant box barriers closing off half of the street and providing shade to extend the crappy sidewalks so people can walk, shop, dine, or bike on those reclaimed spaces, rather than have it used by cars, permanently. But that would mean leaving just 2 lanes (1 lane per direction) for cars, along with a strict speed limit, which would probably make the car brains go nuclear and coup d’etat whoever is in charge, or at least make sure they are never voted back into power again.
That kind of arrangement, a smaller city like Silay, with its sizable heritage zone, or Talisay, Bago, and Victorias, can probably get away with, provided that they have leaders willing to commit to a revolutionary shift to active transport. However, with so much inertia to be overcome, especially with our car-centric mindset, these car-free possibilities will only remain a pipe dream, at least until the new generation makes it clear that their paradigms when it comes to public and active transportation have already shifted in another direction, which is hopefully better than the one we have been on for decades.
For now, all we have are car free day gimmicks, where public officials can tease us with the possibility that they are actually invested in the concept, but the truth of the matter is that they don’t have the wherewithal to take it any further than a few hours and a few hundred meters, at least until they are somehow convinced that their constituents are actually ready for such a change.*
