[sustran] "Sustainability will not wait!" - Some organizational changes and new developments here -

[eric.britton at ecoplan.org]

Sunday, July 25, 2004, Paris, France, Europe

 

Dear Friends:

 

As we told you at the beginning of the year 2004 is an active and
important period for the New Mobility Agenda and its extensions, and to
avoid any eventual confusion let me simply give you the current
highlights:

 

1.	Collective Actions/Peer Support :   We are aggressively
expanding the areas of cooperative work, peer support and international
exchange – the Value Capture Initiative, the recent much contested WTN
Nomination for the London Congestion Charging project, and the just
getting underway international peer review of the recent and possibly
mis-titled WBCSD report Mobility
<http://www.wbcsd.org/includes/getTarget.asp?type=DocDet&id=6094>  2030:
Meeting the Challenges to Sustainability --  with other joint projects
in the wings. 


2.	The New Mobility 20/20/20 Program: We are starting to initiate
contacts to see if we can together in this great informal group create
and support a world wide wave of ambitious local New Mobility City
Dialogues which can help lay the base for much more ambitious
sustainable mobility projects and programs in their cities and
communities.  When we say ambitious we have several things in mind: 

a.	Specific projects and initiatives which are aimed at achieving
significant near term improvements in the city’s mobility arrangements.
As a target we want to get behind any project that is targeting
significant on-street, in-lung improvements in 20 months or less. (If
you are looking for a motto for this, what about “Sustainability will
not wait!”)
b.	Packages of policies and projects which will together target to
achieve significant improvements in global system sustainability
performance—which together will reduce peak hour traffic by at least 20%
over the target period. More, the target is specifically to reduce the
number of private cars on the city streets, while in parallel providing
street space and support for a wide range of alternative movement
arrangements, both familiar and innovative.
c.	Targeting in the overall transportation budget, significant
amounts to achieve these objectives – specifically adjusting the global
spending program so that at least 20% of the total budget is aimed at
supporting the emerging sustainability  package. 

 

We thus are moving into a new stage here. And while not by any means
backing away from our continuing support in terms of information and
discussion spaces in the various program areas which constitute the New
Mobility Agenda and its extensions, we now want to go to work to become
much more focused and proactive. This shift in focus has been some time
coming and has already manifested itself in several of our specific
program areas. Now however, and in part I have to confess stimulated by
the, to my mind, enormous anomaly of the leisurely 2030 horizon for
sustainability chosen by the WBCSD team for their analysis, we are ready
to move ahead with a much more aggressive action oriented approach,
which is posited on the conviction not only that sustainability will not
wait, but also that the move to sustainability is going to have to come
from aggressive, structured, well supported initiatives and innovations
at the personal and local levels. We have to get together now to define
clearly the sustainability agenda in very specific, practical day to day
terms, and then through force of character and our ability to convince,
work with local government to move ahead in their cities and
communities, without waiting for the world to come to our aid.  We have
seen all too clearly, that that simply will not happen.

 

For the record, and to summarize:

*	The New Mobility Agenda is as always at http://newmobility.org
*	To address communications to the New Mobility @Forum, the mail
address is still WorldTransport at yahoogroups.com
*	And for the New Mobility Café, it’s
NewMobilityCafe at yahoogroups.com 

 

Next steps:

1.	I invite you to pitch in to the WBCSD peer review, and
specifically within the weeks ahead help us in coming up with a specific
list of actions and measures that we can then recommend both for the
sponsors of the Mobility 2030 report (since they have asked for it), and
to others who their report has targeted to inform and influence.


2.	Give some thought to how to organize New Mobility City
Dialogues: cycles of well supported local workshops and planning
sessions bringing together the full panoply of players in that place
over a full week or so, perhaps supported by some of us here who may be
useful to them as they start their push for new thinking and new
practices to break the Sustainable Mobility impasse in their city.  (We
have some on-going discussions for a first such cycle with a number of
organizations in the city of Toronto Canada, which I hope we shall be
able to report here as an example of how this might work in one place.
In truth, in a number of cities quite a bit is already going on along
these lines, but it is our hope that with the support we can together
give to such programs and perhaps the bit more structure as suggested
here, these on-going local initiatives and groups will be better
supported and moor effective in achieving the near term results which
are, in fact. The very guts of what sustainability is all about.

 

(Sorry to have carried on, and thanks for humoring me on this. I hope
though that you agree that this just may be a promising approach and one
worth pursuing together).

 

Eric Britton

 

The Commons: Increasing the uncomfort zone for hesitant administrators
and politicians; pioneering new concepts for business, entrepreneurs,
activists, community groups, and local government; and through our joint
efforts, energy and personal choices,  placing them and ourselves firmly
on the path to a more sustainable and more just society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/private/sustran-discuss/attachments/20040725/bfb721c5/attachment.html