World Car-Free Day, eDay

Saturday was world car-free day, so to honour the occasion Cal and I drove all over the place. We racked up a heck of a lot of kms, exhaled a great deal of carbon, and consumed much precious oil.
I feel no guilt. We’re both pretty good with the minimal car-usage thing by and large, and it just happened that car-free day lined up with a day when we were able to do a whole bunch of important missions. So we roamed from Wellytown to Porirua to the glorious Hutt valley and back again, fitting in some dog-at-beach along the way. It was pretty good, actually. Also fulfilled some duties and ate some salted liquorice. Yums.
You can survive quite happily in Dubtown without a car, but there’s so much you can only do with a car, even in a dense and well-connected environment like this. No regrets, as far as I’m concerned.
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Still on the enviro-tip, this coming Saturday is eDay 2007 – the annual day when computer waste of all types can be dropped off, free of charge, at recycling spots in ten NZ cities. It’s the only day of the year when you can offload your old computer stuff to a place that will recycle the heck out of it. Computer waste is a particular nuisance, it’s extremely hard to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way, so this is a great opportunity to audit your shelves and cupboards and sheds for old computer bits and pieces to take and drop off. Don’t just chuck that stuff in the rubbish pile – get it to eDay, where everything that can be re-used, will be re-used.

6 thoughts on “World Car-Free Day, eDay”

  1. I query your use of “well connected environment”. If it were well connected, then you wouldn’t only be able to do it with a car. Thus I think you are lying to me with your whole post, and secretly you are ashamed that you drove around on car free day. Tisk tisk!

  2. Well, you’ve got less reason to feel guilt than the Wallace Corporation, who got convicted of illegally burying toxic chemicals – though the fact they denied it in court says how much guilt *they* feel…
    Oh, and sorry for spamming your blog for this 😉 I just feel it’s underpublicised…

  3. Chuck – I think the point I was meandering towards is that even in a well-supplied public-transport environment, there are still rationales for car use. You need to get a public transport system on the level of New York or London before cars really stop making sense. (It is only coincidence that both of those are big cities.)
    Andrew – yeah man. I mean to blog about that too this week, since reading your post on the subject – I hadn’t heard about it before.

  4. hey morgue, i didn’t even have a point so huh! i just wanted to drive in some guilt. feel it baby! pedal to the metal guilt!
    i need to get back out on sidonia. after all i have got news to shout to the world… but for the moment i shall remain lurking in your comments reminding everyone that you are in fact a gas-guzzling, environmental villian. You are BAD MAN morgue!
    By the way there is nothing right about the compound word: rationales.

  5. I feel car-guilt all the time.
    Even though the way we use our car I probably shouldn’t.
    I shall continue to tell myself that Formula 1 Racing still exists and other people have SUVs.
    Then maybe the despair will stop the guilt :-F

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