Trailnet Champions: Car Free STL
In each of our monthly newsletters, Trailnet features a member of our community who is working toward Trailnet’s vision of Streets for All. In September 2024, we featured the folks behind @carfreestl.
To celebrate their pioneering work as local urbanists, artists and organizers, we asked a few questions of Christian and Natalia—the brilliant minds behind Car Free STL!
Who are you?
Christian: My name’s Christian Frommelt and I use they/them or he/him pronouns. I’m a freelance dancer, musician, and writer currently living in Dutchtown. Historic preservation work is what drove me to activism in streets and mobility because as a young adult I was appalled to learn how many neighborhoods and cultural sites we demolished for highways and parking lots.
Natalia: My name is Natalia and I use she/her pronouns. I am a Graphic Designer, Illustrator and jazz dancer from Southern California. I moved to St Louis a little over a year ago and quickly fell into activism around public transit and pedestrian-conscious infrastructure. As someone who has lived with a disability my entire life, never owning a car or having a license, this work holds personal significance for me.
What is Car Free STL?
Christian: @carfreestl started as an Instagram venting outlet for me during the pandemic, but it didn’t take off until I met Natalia in 2022 and she started creating the visual designs that Car Free STL is known for. It’s still mostly a side project, but earlier this year we discovered the positionality of Car Free STL in this ecosystem: we’re in the business of shifting and complicating narratives around car-centricity, interrogating its harms and excesses, and illuminating future streets where safety and pleasure are built in. The normalcy bias around cars is the result of Motordom redefining the very nature of our streets and public space, something they still spend $12 billion per year on ads to control. Carfreestl is our attempt to say, this system isn’t working at all for at least a third of Americans, and under that veneer of freedom, luxury, and convenience, is a series of ugly truths we need to confront.
What is the Week Without Driving?
Week Without Driving is a great opportunity to disrupt the status quo, and to invite people into the process of demanding safe and equitable streets on a grassroots level. Perhaps you are someone who needs to drive because you live far away from your workplace. This is an opportunity to try to take public transit, knowing in advance it will be a challenge, perhaps having to wake up an hour earlier or walking for 15 minutes down a hostile road––now you are in the shoes of people who do that daily. But perhaps there is delight too: how did you spend that time on the bus, and who did you meet along the way? For WWD to really count we need people to go beyond that week alone to create lasting ripple effects––new relationships with sidewalks, roads, transit agencies––for systemic change.
We are particularly excited for the October 4th Bike Bus to City Hall for WWD, which is a STL Coalition to Protect Cyclists and Pedestrians collab. We’ve had various alderpeople and city officials ride before, and we’re hoping to increase that number on this ride!
What else should the people know about?
Our shameless plug is that we have some exciting plans for a print project that we hope will educate and activate the public around these issues as we head into a hefty engagement phase for the city’s Transportation and Mobility Plan. The best way to support our labor and overhead costs (and get some sweet merch in the process) is to join us on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/CarFreeSTL
