European cities stage an annual car-free day on Wednesday aimed at reclaiming, for a few hours at least, traffic-choked streets and at cleansing urban air fouled by exhaust fumes.More than a thousand cities and towns that are home to 120 million people—most of them in the European Union but including locations in Asia and Latin America—have promised measures to encourage public transport or seal off the center, giving freedom to pedestrians, bikes and cultural festivities.Some places will offer bus and commuter train transport for free or reduced rates, or offer bike hire in the hope of coaxing drivers out from behind the steering wheel.Launched in 1998 by France at the behest of its then environment minister, Dominique Voynet, a Green party member, “In Town Without My Car!” has had a checkered time.Last year some 1,300 towns and cities took part.The turnout in 2004 is likely to be around 1,100 despite support from an EU-sponsored “mobility week,” launched on Thursday, which aims to promote alternative means of transport to the car and child-safer streets.The event has taken off in some cities but is sputtering in others.Among European cities, neither Rome nor Berlin are taking part this year, and street closures in Paris are being scaled back to largely token levels because of huge traffic jams in 2003.However, the event is doing well in Spain, which accounts for more than 200 participating towns, and Austria, where 166 places are taking part.The organizers are serene, believing that taming the car will be a long and incremental campaign that starts with winning hearts and minds.“The overall aim of the ‘In Town Without My Car!’ campaign is to encourage public awareness of the need to act against pollution caused by the increase in motorized traffic in the urban environment,” said their website, www.22september.org.“In fact it is not just a question of fighting atmospheric pollution or noise but also of improving the quality of urban life.”On that score green militants point to some big successes in recent years, the most dramatic of which is in Europe’s biggest city.London Mayor Ken Livingstone fought the car lobby and Britain’s conservative press last year to ram through a “congestion charge” of five pounds (US$8.90) in the capital’s business heart.Seventy-percent of drivers, according to Britain’s Automobile Association (AA), have given up driving into London because of this charge and the high cost of parking. Bus use has gone up 38 percent, and bus delays have fallen by 30 percent, said the city hall.The next step will be to double the geographical range of the congestion charge, so that it covers the posh districts of Kensington and Chelsea.In France the number of cities taking part in the car-free day has plummeted, from 98 in 2002 to just 50 this year.But anticar consciousness is consolidating, even though it has to wrestle ambivalently with the public’s love affair with the car.According to an environment ministry survey, 30 percent of the measures that French towns will introduce on Wednesday—bus corridors, cycle tracks, river buses and so on—will be permanent.And a survey conducted for the insurance group AXA found that a huge majority of car owners (69 percent of those interviewed) backed the government in a controversial scheme to impose heavy taxes on gas guzzlers.South American cities taking part in Wednesday’s initiative are led by Salvador and Belo Horizonte in Brazil; Asian participants are led by Yokohoma and Nagoya in Japan and Taipei.--AFP