[sustran] "I am a little concerned that discussions may become dominated by North...

[Britton (EcoPlan Paris)]

Paul,

With ref to your "I am a little concerned that discussions may become
dominated by North
American (and to some extent European) issues, concerns and viewpoints",
let me share a couple of quick thoughts with you, based on rather too many
years of experience in these matters, South and North.

It might possibly be a very big mistake indeed for you to attempt to reign
in the proceedings with too much vigor for a number of reasons.  This is
not to say that this whole lot cannot do with constant kind  reminders as
to your ultimate geographic focus. But given your worthy objectives,  it
would be a great pity for you to reduce your available brainpower.( And if
you are looking for an analogy, you may wish to consider what happened in
places in which well-meaning (well, maybe) government types decided to
place high trade barriers on computer hardware and software.  Did this
authoritarian  move, which led to high cost, low quality, and ultimately
low volume equipment in this vital sector, really help anybody other than a
handful of chums?)

For better or worse the leading edge in alternative transportation thinking
and practice, with pitifully few exceptions, is what we might well call the
Old World (of SOA Transportation), I.E. North America and Europe.  Those
are the places that thrashed out the original (and often hugely bad)
paradigms of transportation that all the rest are now more or less blindly
following.  They are the guys that write the books, provide the
consultants, fund and staff the banks,  and influence the professors and
the policy makers in the Third World.  For better or worse!

And, surprise!, these are also the parts of the world that are pushing
ahead with the new alternatives, to a far greater extend than in almost all
of the South.  Now this is possibly worth bearing in minds, because it
means that just as they provided the old paradigm (cars all over the place
and the devil take the hindmost), they are also in the process of
developing some of the new ones.

So what we need is not a reduced forum but a powerful synthesis which
provides a means for using the best of whatever it is you can find to do
the hob .  If instead  you put all your regional guys in some sort of
isolated ward, you risk  to get a lot of unnecessary flailing about with
ideas that just may have at least the rudiments of  a useful history in my
"Old World" (take car sharing, as but one example).  

Paul, I think that you are in fact  moving in the right direction on this. 
Perhaps as you do it, you will bear in mind one, I think, hugely useful
building block for a convivial transport system.  And that is wherever you
can use clever architecture instead of lots of policing to get the results
the community needs and aspires to, everyone is left better off.

Here are a couple of quick closing ideas for you that integrate some of
these ideas in concrete practical form.

(1) Make abundant  use of World Transport Policy and Planning as an
existing, highly respected and altogether appropriate  print forum for your
ideas. 

(2) And if you wish to post working papers, reports, etc. for convenient
international distribution, we would be pleased to set up a special ftp
site under The Commons, to which your subscribers could turn for easy
access.

In closing, let me say that there is obviously a lot of fine tuning that
will now be needed to make this idea of yours work, but if we all  keep our
eyes and ears open I am confident that it will be possible to make the
necessary adjustments in time to maintain the momentum that you have now
started to develop.  This is a modest little initiative that truly deserves
success.

With good wishes to you all,

Eric Britton

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