City councillors are moving forward with plans for a car-free day in Canterbury.

They want the stunt to promote alternative forms of transport in an effort to reduce congestion and improve air quality.

Few concrete details are available except that the day may involve road closures and is proposed for a date in the second half of September this year.

But one critic says the late September timing will run into students returning for the start of the new academic year and branded the idea “green scaremongering” over pollution levels.

Labour group leader Alan Baldock put the idea to a meeting of Canterbury councillors last night, pointing out that some 120 European urban areas had already experimented with car-free days.

He said: “The aim would be to highlight the alternatives to driving into the city centre and emphasise the environmental damage caused by traffic, a problem that is set to get much worse and is already significant and damaging to health.

“We want to highlight the alternatives such as public transport, cycling and walking as well as park and ride. We could close some streets as part of it.

“Does Canterbury have the courage to create this powerful and symbolic act as a message about our environmental problem?”

Canterbury Society chairman Jan Pahl says her group is backing the alternative transport message – especially with 4,000 homes planned for farmland to the south of Canterbury.

She said: “We would like to link this suggestion to the idea of modal shift, by which we mean the process of altering the ways in which people habitually travel.

“Modal shift is also essential if we want to improve the quality of the air we breathe. We need to get more people out of their cars and into buses and trains, on to bikes or other non-polluting forms of transport, or walking.”

But Steve Coombs, a key campaigner against the failed Westgate Towers traffic trial, is unconvinced by the idea.

“Yes, this has been tried out in other places, but they are places with far better public transport systems than ours,” he said.

“Nottingham, for example, has 10 train stations and a tram system. What’s more this has been suggested for late September when a lot of the students are coming back to Canterbury.

“There is also a lot of scaremongering by the green contingency over pollution.

“A lot of people use their cars for work. Let’s not make life a real pain for ordinary people.”

The Canterbury Area Member Panel agreed to set up a working group to look into the idea of a car-free day in Canterbury later this year.