[sustran] The New Mobility Environment - summary and example

[ecoplan.adsl at wanadoo.fr]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jerry Schneider [mailto:jbs at u.washington.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 5:40 AM
Subject: The New Mobility Environment - summary and example

 

Eric. I am curious as to what new ways of moving about you might have in
mind. Jerry Schneider, Prof. Emeritus, Innovative Transportation
Technologies website:     http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans

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Good morning Jerry,

 

You were not the only one to ask about this, so I wrote up the attached
note yesterday in an attempt to scope out the rough outlines of what I
have in mind. You will note that the approach laid out here, for better
or worse, focuses on . . . 



(1)     Near Term Improvements that can begin to generate positive
impacts within days of being brought on line - and not potential
improvements that require years or decades to come on line, which I
leave up to others brighter and better informed about all that than I
am.  The theory here, in a sound bite, is that "sustainable development
will not wait".  (Or do I have that wrong?)



(2)     Aggressive demand management: An aggressive (and well sold)
repartitioning and refocusing of the existing transportation
infrastructure, shifting it over ineluctably and as quickly as the local
situation can bear the pain to higher throughput, more spatially and
environmentally efficient shared uses; 



(3)     New streams of income. become available (to ingenious city
innovators) as (1) they make drivers pay fairly for street and parking
infrastructure, then redirecting this welcome new income to make the
rest of the system work better.  And (2) refashion their financial
relationships with the purveyors of the whole range of new collective
services (whose better performance, i.e., more sustainable mobility bang
per taxpayer buck, can be expected to higher quality services that can
be fairly charged for and then fairly partitioned (with payback to the
public sector as only fear. and necessary.)



(4)     Aggressive supply expansion: The opening up of the system on the
supply side to bring in the wide range of new kinds of services needed
to fill the gap once we get most of the cars out.  Again, these new
services are characterized by new sources of supply, much higher levels
of entrepeneurship and creative adaptation across the whole range of
suppliers, and lots of technology (mainly in the form of communications
and logistics. Note: the two main historical suppliers of shared
transport on the city street, buses and taxis, are themselves of course
in continuing and of late in many places rapid evolution in terms of
their technology content and efficiency. Indeed we can anticipate that
the merge between "old" and "new" carriers will in many places be a
merge, with all kinds of overlaps and interlinks.



(5)     Leadership:  None of this, absolutely none of it, will take
place without strong, wise, firm leadership, and strong support from
those of us who care.  And the lead has to come above all from local
government.  National, regional and international groupings can help
make this happen, but the precondition are the small group of people who
are right next to the problems, and the opportunities - and are ready to
pay the price in terms of their commitment, passion, energy (and thick
skin) to stand the heat and make this work..  

 

I hope that this is not too long and too vague.

 

Eric Britton

 

 

Monday, June 28, 2004, Paris, France, Europe

 

I have been contacted by phone this morning by several members of our
group who have asked me to provide a bit more detail on what I have
called the New Mobility Environment.  Kind thanks of the opportunity.
In the hope that it will help me make my point, let me offer these
remarks in the context of what is going on in London today with their
congestion charging program and other parts of their package.  In that
context, it represents a sort of "what next" strategy (of which I am
sure they have just about al the pieces well in hand).

 

1.       Step 1 is to cut down on the presence of private cars through a
three part strategy:

a.       Continuous reductions in the amount of road space they can
access (turning the rest that is thus liberated over to more efficient
users. all such more efficient carriers and not just traditional buses
and the usual);

b.       Making drivers pay for the use of scarce public resources: road
pricing and .

c.       Strategic parking policy (still one of the most powerful car
control tools we have and which we are still in most places greatly
under-utilizing);

2.       All three of these (and the rest by the way) are dynamic
continuing processes with public understanding an approval (backed and
sold through strong and imaginative leadership).  We are creating a New
Moblity Environment deliberately, in stages and over time. In doing this
there are two messages that we need to get through to all concerned, and
then make happen.  The first is that this announced process gives
citizens, industry and the rest time to adapt.  The second is the
unremitting assurance that this pattern of change is going to be
sustained over the longer term

 

3.       Lovely.  This gives us a London with fewer cars, and more room
for public transit to make their way through the streets on time.  But
is that enough for a world city? (or for that matter for your city?)

 

4.       No. We also need new forms of mobility to serve the city and
its people and businesses at the needed high level of efficiency.  And
as luck would have it we know a few things about them in advance.  Let
me start with first handful:

a.       First, they are going to be very different from just about
everything that we presently know and use - which indeed is why we need
them since the older approaches will be far from enough to supply the
quality of transit that is needed in a city that works.

b.       Then, they are gong to be many in number - in a city of the of
London, maybe we should be thinking in terms of more than one hundred
thousand, perhaps several hundred thousand such vehicles plying the
streets at all times.  (I hope that number scares you or makes you
laugh. Since that indeed is the scale that we need to be looking to.)

c.       Moreover, they are not all going to be of a standard cut of
cloth.  There will be many types and levels of service (and cost)
offered.

d.       And since they are decidedly different, there are inevitably
going to be a very large number of barriers which will combine to keep
them from coming into being - unless city government is able to find
ways to target and override these obstacles to improvement.  (Of which
we have seen some pretty interesting demonstrations in the case of
resistance to the Congestion Charging project.)

e.       These new services are going to be highly flexible, highly
entrepreneurial and provide the means for offering high quality service
but with flexible groups of people (and goods) on board and being
services at all time.

f.         And in this we can know that their logistics and
communications content and level of sophistication is going to hold one
of the key to their needed high performance.

g.       Finally (for now), we are aware that this will be achievable
only with the support of high levels of technical competence and active
participation by those responsible for managing and planning the public
infrastructure on which all these vehicles and service are going to move
over.

 

Of course all this is hardly new and certainly not anything that I can
lay claim to.  But since I was asked to see if I could put some of the
main pieces of the puzzle together this morning in a page or so, I have
done that and hope that this will possibly be useful and inspire better
ideas and comments than what you see here. 

 

Eric Britton

 

 

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