[sustran] Ten Steps Towards More Sustainable and People-Centred Transport

[eric britton]

The "first steps" statement of Access Exchange International - together with
your "Ten Steps", our Granada Declaration for Accessible Cities, the 1996
Canadian "Sustainable transportation Principles" statement, et al - bring
this to mind.

Lots of good ideas and important points running around there but,
eventually, they all begin to sound a lot alike (no great problem there)
but, and here the problems begin, gradually begin to collapse (in the eyes
of the beholder) under their own complications, complexity and sheer weight
(a bit like this sentence now that I think about it). Thus, they tend to
loose shape and become hard to remember, to keep in mind.

What we have is, thus, a kind of messiness, when what we clearly need if we
are ever to get the message across is elegance, in the sense one uses the
word in mathematics or chess. So, perhaps we should give some thought to one
or two alternative approaches might help get our important points across, as
oppose to what we presently have, which I lately have begun to call "walls
of words".

Let me see if I can get the ball rolling on this.

A first alternative approach might be to reassemble all the most important
core ideas and see if we can somehow organize them into a tree-like form,
with at the top (or perhaps easier to envisage, on the extreme left) the
fundamental concept that we are trying to drive at.  Call it Sustainable
Transport for now (until someone domes up with something better). ST in turn
is driven by no more than a literal handful of key principles, each of which
clearly distinct from the others and somehow all fitting together to create
an integral and comprehensive macro view.  And these in turn can be fed by a
third layer of more detailed drivers, each of which not only important in
itself but also clearly lodged in the right place and a solid stone in our
arch which holds up the great weight of our ambitious undertaking.

Sorry to be so abstract about it, but I really think that we can gain
something - if our goal is to communicate effectively and not just to feel
good - by bearing in mind how people/s minds and retentive capacities
actually work (as opposed to how we would like them to work for our intents
and purposes).

Which brings us to the bottom line of how might this all be somehow conveyed
by a single image.  Very very delicate business that.  And moreover one
which all us school-bred, book-bred folk tend to do, if at all, with truly
leaden hands.

Which is no reason not to try?  We can even put that other half of our
brains to work.

Eric Britton

EcoPlan International -- Technology, Economy, Society