[sustran] Information on 'Bike Taxi' -" E pur si muove"

[ecoplan.adsl at wanadoo.fr]

"A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." -- Sir Winston
Churchill, October 1, 1939.

 

These fine, instructive and yes! in the final analysis truly and
fundamentally puzzling exchanges in these last days bring me back to
something that I have been meaning to share with all of you for some
time. This is in part prompted by conversations on this topic during a
recent visit here of Dinesh Mohan here on the occasion of his role in
the panel presenting that important WHO report on traffic and injuries.
Since it also touches on something that keeps coming up in my work,
observations and international exchanges. 

 

And since I have yet to get my arms around the issues, I would at least
like to share with you in the form of a handful of riddles, conundrums,
and puzzlements which I now put before you in my growing perplexity. And
to which you may have some answers. Or, better yet, paths toward
answers.

 

1.      Is it too much to say that the massive introduction of low cost
(motorized) two (three) wheelers into the traffic stream in city after
mega city around the world is, in a phrase, CHANGING EVERYTHING IN THE
DOMAIN OF TRANSPORT POLICY AND PRACTICE ?

2.      Might it be that their diminutive surface areas (street-take,
parking-take) and behaviour in the traffic stream is totally out of line
with everything the transport and traffic planners ever learned in
school and have practiced in almost all cities of the world? (Among
thousands of anomalous examples one recent case from just across the
Channel: the utter inability (thus far) of the London Congestion
Charging team to deal with motorized two-wheelers in their scheme. And
that's just a (relatively) simple case).

3.      Another anomaly that sets traditional transportation thinking in
its head: these buzzing belching flying creatures are creating
situations in which suddenly private transport (door to door, etc.) is
both cheaper and faster than public transport. Thus they are undermining
the usual arguments for subsidy to public carriers.  And of course the
market, meaning that we have more empty (or empty-ish) taxpayer
subsidized buses. Ouch!

4.      And they (now we are mainly into what we are calling here 'bike
taxis' but much of this applies as well to all motorized cycles in
cities) are dangerous, dirty, uncontrollable, prone to corruption of
divers types, etc.

5.      And what about women, shoppers, children, the elderly, the
infirm, etc. who are not necessarily easy customers for these services?
Do we simply forget about them? (As we often have in the past.) 

6.      But . . .  in places of high unemployment. "Bike Taxis" and the
like offer income earning possibilities to poor young people (and where
you rather have them on a motorbike or throwing torches at Government
House. It is a choice after all.)

7.      From the usual formal planning and policy perspective in most
places at least, these gizmos simply do not exist.  (And yet if you look
out on the street, as Galileo said: e pur si muove. which with your
permission I will translate to: "And yet they move".

8.      And when they do (finally) come into the lagged sights of the
indolent policy makers (usually as a result of some kind of press
wake-up call), the knee-jerk reaction is all too often either (a) to ban
them (whereby all the problems conveniently disappear) and/or (b) to
"control" them. (But certainly not to understand them. am I not right in
this?)  Both these reactions are, as we can see in city after city, not
very productive from the vantage of sustainable development and social
justice, or even simple systemic efficiency out there on the street.

9.      Should those of us who care about these things continue to leave
them in the hands of impatient administrators who decide one day to
instruct the police to toss all the becas into the ocean.  Or, more
often, just to stay under the desk and pretend that it does not exist
and will go away.

10.  So where does this bring us?  To deal with this brave new world,
should we just throw away all the old transport dogmas and designs, and
simply rejigger the whole system around two wheelers? 

11.  Or can we continue to patch and band-aid here and there in city
after city and hope to  get good results?

12.  Or do we have to start to create a new multi-level Third World City
transportation paradigm with new classes of vehicles and street users to
be brought into the formal planning lens?

13.  Suppose for the moment that we limit our attention to all this from
an Asian perceptive. (We can then later take what we have learned and
apply it to the other parts of the world in which his new transportation
paradigm is emerging.)

14.  We are talking about HUGE NUMBERS.  And a process that is already
well engaged.

15.  Anybody mention Kyoto?

16.  Maybe a good starting place in this clearly much needed rethinking
of transport in cities is to step back and ask (as Dinesh suggested):
WHAT IS A STREET ANYWAY?

17.  Is it a place meant for cars? Are all streets in a city alike? Do
we need to have more gradations in terms of transport types to
accommodate? 

18.  And what about the important non-transport functions of streets as
public spaces? As meeting places? As venues for peddlers, hucksters,
hawkers?  Places to rest or sleep? Uses that put in Jane Jacobs'
wonderful words "eyes on the street", public presence that act to temper
violence and personal attack? 

 

What I am trying to say that while cities around the world are de facto
reinventing transport, those of us who care should now get to work to
develop new paradigms, tools and visions of how all this newness can be
better understood and put to better use.

 

Are these things that we should be talking about here? And as part of
this seeing what we might do to increase consciousness of the issues at
stake and somehow, somewhere figuring out how to advance this important
agenda?

 

Thank you for your patience.  And for your ideas.

 

Eric 

 

The New Mobility Agenda at http://newmobility.org 

The New Mobility Forum at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WorldTransport/

 

The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative 

Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France

Tel: +331 4326 1323         Mobile: +336 8096 7879

24 hour Fax/Voicemail hotline: +33 (1) 53 01 28 96

IP Videoconference: 81.65.50.63

Email: postmaster at ecoplan.org    

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/private/sustran-discuss/attachments/20040825/194542a1/attachment-0001.html