Carfree Conference 2008

Our friends at the World Carfree Network (worldcarfree.net) have a lot on their plate these days. The organization, based in Prague, has been growing rapidly, both in membership and in the number and scope of projects their small staff takes on each year. Their primary mission is to connect and empower member organizations, and they also have a number of distinct projects, like the Towards Carfree Cities conferences, Carbusters Magazine, and several outreach programs in Europe.

WCN is currently seeking some new volunteers to help overhaul their website in order to help them be a better resource for their member organizations. If you have skills with technical web stuff, information architecture, graphic design, web mapping, and/or content management, and would be interested in helping WCN take this big leap into the modern world, feel free to contact Justin Hyatt (justin at worldcarfree dot net).

Steph’s gotten a bunch of conference presentations up on Slideshare, and I’m having a great time going through and watching them — I hardly got to see any in person, so it’s nice to see what folks were talking about all week. Here’s the link:

http://www.slideshare.net/TCC08/

You can make your presentation from the conference available up there as well by sending it to steph dot routh at gmail dot com.

On Monday after the conference I was in San Francisco and I went and watched the casual carpooling at one of the popular pick-up points, College and Claremont in Oakland.  In an hour and a half 49 carpools were formed, giving rides to 112 people, none of which was pre-arranged. 

For more about this I have put more detail under ‘Pages/Share your work’, click on this link:

http://www.livablestreets.com/projects/carfree08/flexible-carpooling

- Paul 

We got a lot of questions about our tote bags and volunteer tee shirts. Here are the details on where they came from, and some more about the cool local businesses that hooked us up.

The sharp volunteer t-shirts were made by Sonadei, a new Seattle-based bike wear company that approached us with great enthusiasm and support just as we were about to give in and buy some very boring volunteer shirts indeed. They are offering these shirts on their website for $20 USD plus shipping. Here is the product link.

The tote bags are another great story. They were handmade individually by Elaine Loving of Reuseable Solutions in Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland. She finds discarded fabric that is on its way to the landfill — remnants, curtains, sheets, whatever she can find — and gives it a new life in the form of these beautiful tote bags. We commissioned 400 of them for the conference and silkscreened them by hand (along with those more varied t-shirts that were on sale throughout the conference) over two long evenings in Gregg and Nikki’s backyard. You can buy Elaine’s bags online — though not, unfortunately, with our image on them. They are $15.99 and ship for free if you’re in the US.

The carfree logo, you know, the one that makes you feel like you were just at a rock festival rather than a transportation conference, was designed by Portland artists Justin Gorman and Caleb Freese.

Hello everyone!

In case you didn’t know, we already have two Streetfilms up from the conference…

Depaving Day: http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/depaving-day/

Sunday Parkways: http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/portlands-sunday-parkways/

Possibly one or two others to come!

Hi Everyone! We had an awesome time last week at the Towards Carfree Cities Conference, and it was great to meet many of you.

Welcome to the Carfree Conference group that we’ve created here on the Livable Streets Network. This is a place where we can all stay in touch once the conference is over.

First off, you’ll want to join this group (to join, you’ll need to create a free account on Livablestreets.com). Once you’re a member of the group, you’ll be able to use the tools here to stay in touch and share info with everyone. Here’s a quick rundown of what you can do here once you’re all joined up:

• Discussion — we’ve got a discussion list that includes all of the group members. It’s basically an email list
• Pages — the “pages” section of the group is where you can collaborate on shared documents (in tech terms, it’s a “wiki”). We’ve started a few already, but feel free to add your own.
• Blog — You’re reading it right now. The blog is a way to write up news & other stories that you want to share with group members and others.

That’s about it. Good to have you here and we look forward to talking with you!

I’m doing a little live blogging of the conference over at wrkng.net, and Streetsblog should be picking up coverage tomorrow. So far we’re having a great time!