[sustran] New Mobility Honor Roll - For comment

EcoPlan, Paris eric.britton at ecoplan.org
Fri Oct 29 20:21:33 JST 2004


This is to invite you to review and comment on this closing section of
our working papers being developed in support of the 20/20 New Mobility
Target Initiative (latest version available from us at
<mailto:postmaster at ecoplan.org> postmaster at ecoplan.org.  I hope you
enjoy it and look forward to your comments, corrections, additions and
suggestions so that we can make this more useful and definitive.
Regards, Eric Britton 
 
 
New Mobility Agenda Precursors  
"If I have seen further [than others] it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants."
- Isaac Newton, in a storied letter of 1675 to Robert Hooke
 
The more we discuss this approach with knowledgeable colleagues around
the world, the more we are hearing that it seems plausible that a city
should target something on the order of 20% reductions of peak hour
traffic and pollution within a 20 month target period.  But in many
ways, there is nothing altogether new in this (other than the package).
 
20/20 and the New Mobility Agenda are part of a long line of
sustainability innovation in the transportation sector, where brave and
far-sighted innovators have gotten behind a new concept and make it
work.  The truth, as another Englishman William Blake put it long ago,
is that “God is in the details”.
 
That said, it gives us great pleasure to take this final moment to
identity what we regard as some of the most outstanding precursors to
the ideas that are presented in these pages. Of course everyone will
have their own list, but here is ours. (I am sure that you will have
corrections and candidates of your own, and if so please do let us hear
from you.)
 
New Mobility Honor Roll
1.       Circa 120 A.D., Rome. The Emperor Hadrian purported to say of
Rome traffic: “This luxury of speed destroys its own aim: a pedestrian
makes more headway than a hundred conveyances jammed end to end along
the twists and turns of the Scared Way.” (That said, he then proceeded
to do nothing about it. Sound familiar?)
2.       1958, New York. Demonstrations of neighbors of the Washington
Square Park block proposed extension of Fifth Avenue, which would have
eliminated this popular park and social oasis. 
3.       1961, New York. One of the ringleaders of the 1958
demonstration, Jane Jacobs
<http://www.people.virginia.edu/~plan303/bio.html> , publishes the
path-breaking The
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067974195X/o/qid=950088542/sr=8-
1/102-2342361-8148863>  Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage
Books 
opening up the discussions
<http://architecture.about.com/arts/architecture/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?
site=http://www.jacobs97.com/>  of car restraint in cities 
4.       1950s-1970s, German, Austrian, Swiss cities hold on to their
tramways while the rest of the world “modernizes” with diesel buses. ROW
takes a full generation to learn the lesson.
5.       1950-1960s, Washington D.C.  City holds on to its shared taxis,
permitting it to offer cheap, frequent friendly transport while others
look on and scratch their heads.
6.       1960s, Sweden. Färdtjänst (I need a bit of Swedish help on
this). Provision of ‘car like’ transport for elderly and handicapped via
community deal with taxi drivers. Now operating daily in virtually all
cities in all Nordic countries and spreading.
7.       1965. Amsterdam. Witte Fietsenplan -White Bicycles Community
Bike Project 
established by Luud Schimmelpennink with the city government. The press
announced that the project had “failed” within a year as all the old
bikes pretty much disappeared. Failure? Today there are scores of such
community bike projects in cities around the world drawing on this
path-breaking example.
8.       Mid-sixties, Hamburg. City creates a unified fare/pass system
for all public carriers.
9.       1968, Groningen, Netherlands. First neighborhood Woonerf 
The goal of this at first entirely illegal project led by local
residents was to claim back the street for cars and create safe space
for people, after several mortal accidents involving children and cars.
10.   1969, Copenhagen city engineers decides to attack traffic build-up
in his city by using congestion as a traffic control tool. Thus in a
number of cases when a specific traffic bottle neck was reported, his
decision was to do nothing about it, or to make it worse. In fact, the
traffic “went away” When asked where it went, he responded: “Traffic is
smart. If it can’t move it just does away”. (And he was and is right.)
11.   1965, Curitiba.  City launches first round of attempts to
integrate transportation, land use and urban development in its first
Master Plan, later leading to one of the developing world’s premier
model of innovation in the sector.  
12.   1970s, USA. HOV (high occupancy vehicle) reserved lanes and roads
slowly come into being, with the goals of travel time savings and
improved trip reliability of to provide incentives for individuals to
change from driving alone to carpooling, vanpooling, or riding the bus.
Currently, there are 96 HOV projects on freeways and in separate
rights-of-way in 30 metropolitan areas in North America. These account
for approximately 2,000 centerline miles of HOV lanes.
13.   1973, Portland, Oregon. Mayor Neil Goldschmidt's administration,
following the move of the Oregon Legislature to adopt the US’s first set
of land-use planning laws, puts them to work in their city and goes on
to become on of US’s outstanding sustainability practitioners,
emphasizing mixed use, walkable neighborhood located rail transit.
Residents tend to own fewer cars and drive less than in more
automobile-oriented communities
14.   1973. Zurich U-Bahn project voted down in referendum. Leading the
city to tackle its transportation problems on the surface and in time to
create one of the world’s most sustainable transportation system. (See.
http://ecoplan.org/politics/general/zurich.htm for details.)
15.   1974, Paris. The massive "Voie Express Rive Gauche" urban highway
project of French government abandoned by incoming President Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing under pressure from environment activist led by Rene
Dumont.
16.   1974, Amsterdam. First Witkar electric carsharing station (another
Schimmelpennink  project) opens for business. Project hung on for close
to a decade with minimum government support, and by end had more than
4000 users.
17.   1974, USA. TDM -- Transportation-demand management,: "the art of
influencing traveler behavior for the purpose of reducing or
redistributing travel demand." Concept institutionalized as part of
transportation management system requirement and joint planning
regulations set by Federal Highway Administration and Urban Mass
Transportation Administration
18.   1975, Paris. Carte Orange, monthly transport pass provides
unlimited access to all parts of public transport system to pass
holders.
19.   1975, Singapore. Area Licensing Scheme (First road pricing
scheme.)
20.   1982, Gothenburg, Sweden. First Taxi-80 centralized,
computer-based roving fleet dispatching system deployed by Volvo
Transportation Systems. Over the decade spread to several dozen cities
across mainly Europe where it is today increasingly standard practice. 
21.   Late 1980s, Germany and Switzerland. After years of small scale
projects carsharing begins to emerge as a signification transportation
option.
22.   1989, San Francisco. Construction of Embarcadero Freeway of
Interstate 480 terminated by public reactions and political pressure
after earthquake. Only The Stub was left.
23.   1994, Toledo, Spain. Thursday: Breakthrough Strategies for
Transport in Cities".  First international call for Car/Free Day
experimentation.
24.   1994, Hertfordshire, UK. First small scale Walk to School program
meets some small success and by 200 leads to International Walk to
School program. This year more than 3 million children walked to school
in more than 30 countries during the 2-4 October celebrations. 
25.   1995, Lancaster UK. Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice
founded: aims to provide validated information about latest developments
in sustainable transport policy and practice to enable local
authorities, governments, consultancies, NGOs and supra national
organizations to speed up policy development and implement new ideas
from around the world.  
26.   1996, Reykjavik, La Rochelle, and Bath organize first car/free day
projects.
27.   1997, UK. Clear Zones program created to reduce pollution and
traffic in towns through partnerships between cities, industry, academia
and Government.
28.   2000, Bogota. First mega-carfree day project in third world city
takes 850,000 cars off the city streets for 13 hours, leads to a major
revision in the transportation system, and wins Stockholm Challenge
Prize for Environment with The Commons. 
29.   2003, London. Congestion Charging Scheme (changes the face of road
pricing as a policy tool for transport in cities). Awarded the World
Technology Prize for Environment  for outstanding achievement in San
Francisco celebration on 5 October 2004.
 
Before we leave this behind us, let’s take a moment to reflect on what
these couple of dozen brave innovational approaches have in common as we
look ahead to ways in which each and all of us can do our bit to advance
the New Mobility Agenda and all it stands for:
 
*        Relative to most Old Moblity projects, they cost very little
money.
*        Most of them had small beginnings, and only once the principals
behind them are proven do they take off.
*        None of them have any of the “magic bullet” connotations that
many of the larger old mobility projects often conjure up (and use to
get support needed to get funded and built).
*        All are intensely political.
 
Overall, and in conclusion: all of these projects and experiments are
moving in a board common direction -- and that is straight toward what
we call the New Mobility Agenda: each as one small part of interactive
complexes of transportation arrangements that work together to get us
out of traffic and out of our cars when they simply no longer make
sense, and still get us where we want to go, if anything quicker,
fresher, healthier and cheaper than ever.
 
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