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Marlow | Boston | Durham | Pictures

Programme one: Marlow

Kris's journey starts in the Buckinghamshire town of Marlow, where car ownership is one of the highest in the country. The aim is simple – for just one day, Kris will persuade the people of Marlow to leave their cars at home and go car-free. Kris's aim is to get one in five cars to stay at home.

Kris hopes that after four weeks the town of Marlow will be prepared to go car-free. Her starting point is Marlow's traffic expert Tony Blackmore who can uniquely visualise the town's congestion with a state-of-the-art computer programme. Tony also shows Kris what is potentially the key to unlocking a solution when he demonstrates what rush hour traffic looks like during the school holidays. With a drop of 15-20% in traffic (the equivalent of not using the car one day a week) traffic flows freely. Kris says: 'If you change your behaviour once a week you get a town that works… One journey, one day a week to find an alternative.'

Now Kris has to sell her campaign to the people who drive the cars. After tackling some of the parents at the school gates she invites the parents from one of the local primary schools to a meeting. Out of the 150 parents only 12 turn up, including one mum, who drives 12 minutes to take her children to school, and despite the fact they identify that the traffic is a nightmare they don't take responsibility. That is until Kris shocks them with some hard to ignore stats about children's obesity levels and environmentally related asthma.

As Kris attempts to step the campaign up a gear, she brings together a handful of volunteers to become the campaign group.

But as always finances are not plentiful as one of her volunteer's notes: 'You don't get money out of a council in a week.' If anyone can make this happen, it's Councillor Alex Collingwood. But as Kris makes her case to him, for her campaign on a street corner in Marlow, it's not as straightforward as she hoped.

Concerned she might fail, Kris seeks the assistance of Alex Allen of Sustrans, a charity that encourages walking and cycling. Alex meets with local businessman Peter Kelly and the employees of one of the local businesses. She hopes that by demonstrating that the office workers' perceived 'two-minute journey' into town, is unrealistic. With a challenge pitting two wheels against four, and of course two legs, the race is on to get to a pre-arranged point in the centre of town – a usual journey for the workers at lunch.

With the council coming good with money for posters and publicity, the campaign group start spreading the word about No Car Day. Kris, however, still has to tackle the school run mums and she effectively employs kiddie pester power as the primary school students demonstrate a near 100% enthusiasm for the scheme.

But will it be enough? On No Car Day, will Kris succeed by cutting 20% of the traffic or will the high street be a congestion nightmare?

More about programme one in pictures >>