By Steven Logan

We cannot imagine life without our cars.

A recent visit to my native Toronto suburb helped me gauge this devotion as I rode the sub-par and unreliable public transport, saw traffic jams in unlikely places, read an article on why drivers want to kill cyclists and had dinner conversations about escalating gas prices.

During one of those discussions, I offered up my know-how: There are alternatives to the car, I said.

"What alternatives are there?" went one seemingly earnest reply.

When a society reaches a point where it cannot contemplate an alternative to private transport, especially in the face of staggering monetary costs, reduced quality of life and disappearing public spaces, that society has taken its love affair with the car to its illogical extreme.

We need a divorce from this dysfunctional relationship. And Sept. 22 — World Carfree Day — is as good a day as any to begin the proceedings.

Far too often, the debate about car dependence is shifted away from the alternatives and toward cleaner, "greener" cars. Oil is running out and experts predict it could reach $100 a barrel in the coming years. This makes gas-efficient cars, gas-electric hybrids or even the highly touted hydrogen car appear like saviors for cities choking on their own exhaust.

A cleaner car has its merits. Worldwide, three million people die from pollution-related illness each year. The World Health Organization has concluded that particulate matter in air pollution is a guaranteed health hazard, cutting life spans and leading to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and costing the European Union 29 billion euros in health costs. Particulate matter in the air comes from, among other things, combustion in car engines, as well as erosion of the pavement by road traffic and brake and tire abrasion. These levels in Prague are consistently higher than accepted European levels.

Perhaps, the smart car is not such a stupid idea.

Yet the "greener" car simply displaces the pollution — the hydrogen and the electricity have to come from somewhere — and does little to solve an array of problems associated with increased car dependence. Even as cars have become more fuel-efficient in the last 13 years, carbon dioxide emissions have increased 25 percent in the United States with unchecked suburban sprawl.

Moreover, if a car shows no signs of slowing down as I enter any one of Prague's ridiculously unsafe zebra crossings, it is of little importance whether the car is guzzling gas, electricity or hydrogen. In the Czech Republic last year there were close to 200,000 car accidents, killing 1,215 people and seriously injuring almost 5,000 people, costing, in material damage alone, 9.7 billion Kč. Traffic accidents across the globe kill 1.2 million people each year and are the No. 1 killers of children and those in the age group 5–29.

When cars are not clumsily crashing into each other and our children, they are quietly monopolizing enormous amounts of space. Drivers spend inordinate amounts of time sitting in traffic. (Here's an experiment: Stand at the top of Wenceslas Square during rush hour, if you can brave the particulate matter, and watch the cars crawl along the Magistrála. Out of every 10 cars, how many have only one person in them?)

When we cannot imagine alternatives, it is equally unthinkable that a residence would be built without space for an automobile. One of my colleagues had no choice, according to building codes, but to build two parking spaces for her new home just outside of Prague, which is less than half a kilometer from a local train station. According to Jan Scheurer, whose doctoral thesis looked at carfree housing, an off-street parking bay requires a minimum open space of 25 square meters, about half the size of a studio apartment in Prague, and costs 10,000–30,000 euros.

Cars freely occupy most of the on-street parking outside central Prague. Cars line both sides of the otherwise beautiful, narrow, streets of Krymská or Bulharská in Vršovice, usually swallowing up a bit of the sidewalk, and most of the beauty, in the process.

In the automobile capital of the world, the United States, there are approximately three to four parking spots for each car in the country. That amounts to roughly 800 million parking spots.

What, then, are the alternatives?

Prague has signed the 2005 European Mobility Week Charter and thereby declared that it will implement "at least one new practical measure that is made permanent in the local authority" and that will help get people out of their cars and into more sustainable modes of transport.

These practical measures are, as yet, a mystery. At Prague's 2004 World Carfree Day festivities, I locked my bike to one fancy bike rack, but I never saw that rack in the city again.

For 2005 Prague City Councilor Radovan Šteiner signed the charter on behalf of the city. Activities will occur throughout the week, including the closing of Smetanovo nábřeží between Charles Bridge and the National Theater Sunday, and a "City Police With a Difference" day Wednesday, during which children receive ... special children's driving licenses.

The Czech Republic is, in many ways, a good candidate for car-free living. The country has one of the densest rail networks in the world, and in Prague the public transport system is one of the most dependable in Europe, with the highest amount of dedicated lanes. One-third of all car trips made in the city are under 3 kilometers, while half are under 5 kilometers. These are all trips one can easily take by cycling, walking, public transport or a combination of all three.

As I wrote in a previous column for this paper, although it may be dangerous to get on a bicycle in this city, the more cyclists that are visible on the roads, the more likely it is that Prague will implement a cycling infrastructure and make riding more safe and convenient.

Neighborhoods that do not privilege the car are nothing new. In Vienna, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and in Freiburg and Hamburg, Germany, some enclaves within 3 to 5 kilometers of the city center and close to public transit discourage or prohibit cars and encourage ridesharing. In Vauban, Freiburg, car owners must pay a whopping one-time fee of 17,000 euros plus a 25 euro-per-month parking fee.

In the rest of the world, however, the love affair continues. Public money is lavished on clean car research rather than on public transport or developing networks of bike lanes or ridesharing.

I realize it is unrealistic to ask people to give up their cars entirely. Yet it is equally unrealistic that the car — as a mode of personal, private transport — can survive with the massive motorization currently underway in China and India. Our only choice is to confront the car culture and put right our long and troubled relationship with the automobile.