Carfree.com does not ask whether a city can squeeze in a few more bike lanes. It asks what the city would look like if private automobiles stopped being the organizing principle.
J.H. Crawford developed the site alongside his books Carfree Cities and Carfree Design Manual. The material dates back to the older web and builds a surprisingly detailed reference design rather than stopping at slogans.
There are districts, blocks, freight systems, rail networks, conversion strategies, objections, case studies, design patterns, photographs, papers, and issues of Carfree Times.
A city of one million people, on purpose
One of Crawford’s reference designs imagines a city of one million residents spread across a 16-kilometer site, with only a portion of the land developed and dozens of compact inhabited districts connected by rail.
Walking and cycling handle local movement. Rail handles heavier passenger traffic. Utility areas at the edges deal with parking, industry, and freight.
Whether you agree with every conclusion is almost beside the point. The site does something the modern opinion web often avoids: it follows the idea far enough to expose the engineering and planning problems.
What happens to freight? Where do cars stop? How dense must districts be? Can existing cities convert? How do streets work when pedestrians have priority?
Crawford uses places such as Venice as evidence that dense urban life does not require cars to dominate public space. He also spent years publishing photographs, videos, and observations from cities around the world.
For webmasters, Carfree.com is also a good example of the “book plus website” era. The web component was not a disposable marketing landing page. It became the continuing workshop around the argument.
That gives the site value even decades later.
Carfree.com came from CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research corpus.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
You do not have to want his city. It is enough to appreciate that somebody actually drew the damn thing.