I invite you—after you read these next few lines—to close your eyes for a moment and imagine your city carfree. Listen to the sounds. Look at the people. Smell the air. Imagine walking, cycling, riding on a tram, watching others moving about or stopping to play or chat or sip a cup of tea from a sidewalk stall.

OK, open your eyes again, and your ears and nose to the sound and smell of your actual city. Now, there are of course practical problems to making our cities carfree, but none of them are insurmountable. The greatest difficulty is not how to move people and goods about—all that is possible, and you can read more about it here. The hard part is overcoming the combined lobbying power of the oil, car, and road construction companies and all their allies in governments, media, foundations, the World Bank, and so on. Why do you think we never hear about the possibility of carfree cities? Not because it isn’t possible, but because a few extremely wealthy and powerful corporations have a lot to lose—while billions of people on the planet have almost everything to gain.

Faced with the difficulty of overcoming the power of those corporations, many would decide to give up and accept our current situation as the only practical option. Or we could accept the potential of a better solution and learn to raise our voices. It will involve unravelling a lot of fatuous economic arguments and making some enemies; it would also mean achieving vastly better places to live, and ensuring the sustainability of a decent quality of life on our planet.

For any of you willing to take the challenge, the two places I suggest you go are first, the carfree.com website, then to my book, Beyond Apologies (available for free here and here, and elsewhere).

Dream it, believe it…and help make it happen.