[sustran] Motorcycles & sustainable transport planning (copy of email of 11 April 2000)

[Eric.britton]

--- As I was making my way through the couple of hundred emails that we
have exchanges on this subject here over the last seven years, I ran
into this one of 10 April 2000, which I am pleased to forward to you now
both by way of quick update and also to note that this topic has been
around for some time and has not gotten the level of attention that it
deserves. Oops! ----

Further to the numerous and most interesting (and in many ways quite
discouraging) communications that we have had on this topic in the
last months, I would like to share a few thoughts with the group, in
the hope that it might open up a line of discussion and eventual action.

The motorcycle side of things is certainly a monster problem area when
it comes to making transport in cities sustainable in which the twain
most definitely does not meet. And furthermore, it is one to which I
think we have not yet seen enough focused attention in policy and
practice circles. At least not on this side of the world.

Thus, when we go about building up sustainable transportation
strategies in cities here in, let's call it, the West, we are of
course aware of "two-wheelers" -- but most of this usually takes the
form of trying to figure out how we can get better at providing safe
mobility for people on bicycles. Indeed our sustainable transportation
paradigm in the West calls for more, and hopefully a lot more, people
in bikes. That's part of the S/T gospel and entirely unquestioned as a
laudable objective. And when we get around to motorized two-wheelers
at all in our (relatively) cozy contexts here, it is usually with
reference to some specific focused issues of safety (wear helmets,
drive better, etc.) and, in a few places, noise. And that's it.

But as we read all these reports from our colleagues and media
articles from the Asia/Pacific region, I am once again reminded of the
huge and critical differences in this respect. And while I have lived
and worked in Third World cities, one tends to forget... or at least I
do. Of course we are aware that the basic problem set that faces our
planners and policy makers in Zurich, San Francisco and Bilbao is very
different in many respects from those of KL, Manila or Bangkok. But
this fact of mega-dependence on two-wheelers on the one hand --
further compounded by the prodigious rate at which motorcycles are now
replacing human powered vehicles all over the place (whoosh!), and
shift the whole new universe and scale of transport and environment
related problems and issues that it brings in its wake... all makes it
painfully clear that problem solving in your cities is going to
require a whole new tool kit from that we have managed to build up
thus far here in the West.

So, here is the reality of the situation we face on April 11th, 2000.
On the one hand the leading edge of sustainability thinking and
practice until now has been here in Europe (with a bit of help from
our friends in North America, though more often in theory than in
practice), and while the toolkit is not as yet complete nor altogether
100% adequate for all the challenges we face here on this side of the
world, it is nonetheless picking up momentum and beginning to do a
pretty good job in a growing number of towns and cities. All that's
well and good, but certainly no grounds for complacency or
self-congratulation.

Then there is the other reality. The problems and scales of the cities
of the Third World, which are one or two orders of magnitude more
challenging in just about any sense than anything we have had to deal
with over here - which leads me to propose that we most probably have
to get to work now to development a sustainable transportation
philosophy and toolkit that is going to be apt and sufficient in the
face of these challenges.

Consider the example of our recent car-free day project in February in
Bogotá. By many measures, it was quite a success. We managed to take
something like 800,000 cars off the street and that, warts and all,
accomplishments some truly laudable and useful results (see @World
Car-Free at http://ecoplan. <http://ecoplan.org/carfreeday/>
org/carfreeday/ for details) . But when it
came the motorcycles.... well, for them we did nothing. Zero. Now in
the case of Bogotá, that represents a real oversight but still one
that is not so overwhelming that it would essentially negate the
purpose of the whole thing we were trying to do. So I continue to be
a real proponent of car free days as a useful tool and stepping stone
toward sustainable transport, in certain contexts at least.

But if we think of a car-free day in a place like Ho Chi Minh Ville
here in the year 2000, what a poor joke it would be there. And that
is only one example which I take based on personal experience. If we
get the private cars off the streets of cities like this, what would
we have accomplished? Not a whole hell of a lot.

Ditto for carsharing (terrific tool though it is). Ditto for most of
what goes by the name of traffic calming. Ditto for metros. Ditto for
ITS. Ditto for letting technology and the market take care of the
problem.

This is not to say that "Sustainable Transport - Mach 1" as we might
call it has no lessons or tools to propose. We have indeed learned a
lot in the process and much of this can indeed find useful application
in the new and greatly expanded toolkit for Third World cites that now
has to be built up and put to work. But what is needed stretches way
beyond all that.

So, I guess that we have to get back to work on the sustainable
transport paradigm, and start to develop a toolkit that is going to
make sense and be useful in these other contexts. And what better
place to begin to do this, than right here on good old Sustran.

Eric Britton

ecopl at n ___ technology, economy, society ___
Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France
Eric.Britton at ... URL www.ecoplan.org

 

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