Tbilisi celebrates World Car Free Day this week

Hundreds of citizens of Georgia's capital Tbilisi are encouraged to reduce pollution and noise of the sprawling city for one day by leaving their cars at home this Thursday.

To mark World Car Free Day, Tbilisi Mayor David Narmania will join the global campaign and walk to work, to show how the world could be better with fewer cars on the road as more cars equalled more toxic emissions being pumped into the atmosphere.

World Car Free Day in Tbilisi is being organised and led by the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD) Representative in the Eastern European Neighbourhood Levan Tsutskiridze. He stressed the significance of citizens voicing their issues with their home city.

We, as citizens of Tbilisi, can express what kind of city we would like to live in by leaving our cars at home on September 22. By doing this we can say that we want not a concrete jungle belonging to cars, but a city belonging to us – its residents and its visitors."

Cities are a reflection of what their residents make of them. If we do not care about having less traffic jams, less noise and less pollution, that is what the city will reflect," Tsutskiridze told reporters while speaking about the campaign.

World Car Free Day coincides with the European Mobility Week campaign that seeks to raise awareness on sustainable mobility alternatives. Photo from European Mobility Week.

World Car Free Day has been staged throughout the world each year since 1997 by the World Car Free Network; an international hub promoting "alternatives to car dependence and automobile-based planning".

Organisers of the Tbilisi event urged their social network followers to join the occasion. They said if each person covered 15km of their daily commute without a private vehicle, they would reduce CO2 emissions by 3,500 grams per person on average.

Those behind the local event also asked Tbilisi City Hall and its employees to join the campaign by using public transport instead of their private vehicles on Thursday.

Tbilisi City Hall responded and said Mayor David Narmania and his deputy Lasha Abashidze would walk to work, while other staff would forego private transport.

The Tbilisi event of World Car Free Day is this year being held within European Mobility Week, which raises awareness of "sustainable mobility alternatives to citizens" to "induce behavioural change and make progress towards creating a more sustainable transport strategy for Europe".

Marked from September 16-22, this year European Mobility Week will be joined by 2,345 towns and cities across the world, the highest number since the campaign launched in 2002.