From sujit at vsnl.com Sat Sep 1 16:34:54 2007 From: sujit at vsnl.com (Sujit Patwardhan) Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 13:04:54 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Chicago Transit Fare Hike Message-ID: <4cfd20aa0709010034m53a34692i3c45eddcec0c893d@mail.gmail.com> 1 September 2007 While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about Chicago. I was under the impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in providing transit facilities. -- Sujit Here is the news:- To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services?to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into effect on September 16th. -- ------------------------------------------------------ Sujit Patwardhan sujit@vsnl.com sujitjp@gmail.com "Yamuna", ICS Colony, Ganeshkhind Road, Pune 411 007 India Tel: 25537955 ----------------------------------------------------- Hon. Secretary: Parisar www.parisar.org ------------------------------------------------------ Founder Member: PTTF (Pune Traffic & Transportation Forum) www.pttf.net ------------------------------------------------------ From eric.britton at free.fr Sat Sep 1 18:10:36 2007 From: eric.britton at free.fr (eric.britton at free.fr) Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 11:10:36 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Chicago Transit Fare Hike In-Reply-To: <4cfd20aa0709010034m53a34692i3c45eddcec0c893d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <671479417CDD45A687C1238F3C4B80CA@joey> Dear Sujit and Sustran friends, Don't think that our Chicago CTA friends have made these moves with joy in their hearts. The fact is that they have been trapped by state legislators (many of whom have their power base in rural and small town areas) who have decided to, in a phrase, "punish the CTA for their inefficiency and profligacy". Typically "old mobility" and terribly wrong headed, but if this were only the only city and agency that this kind of thing were to take place this would be a happier planet. In point of fact I have just come back from a lively week on brainstorming session with a group of more than forty experts and agencies around the table, where we gave our full attention to the possibility of "Reinventing Transport in Chicago". You can see more of that if interested in our New Mobility/Climate Emergency Project at www.climate.newmobility.org , where I hope shortly to post some useful information on these sessions. In the meantime, you may fond some us in the "Workpad" that you will find on the bottom left menu of this site in process. Eric Britton 1 September 2007 While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about Chicago. I was under the impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in providing transit facilities. -- Sujit Here is the news:- To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services-to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into effect on September 16th. From etts at indigo.ie Sat Sep 1 21:41:59 2007 From: etts at indigo.ie (Brendan Finn) Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 13:41:59 +0100 Subject: [sustran] Re: Chicago Transit Fare Hike References: <671479417CDD45A687C1238F3C4B80CA@joey> Message-ID: <00fb01c7ec95$7d3dc1b0$3201a8c0@finn> Dear Eric, Sujit, I have argued many times against cheap fare policies (i.e. deliberate under-pricing) and that transit should be as close to self-financing as it can achieve. I have argued three main points : 1) All choice users and many non-choice users have the affordability to pay more than "cheap", and most would be willing to do so for better quality. Under-priced transit uses up the available funds for wealth-transfer, leaving little for quality improvements or reinvestment. Public funds should be spent on service, quality and infrastructure, not on low fares. 2) The vulnerable within society can be supported by subsidising transit passes for them (rather than for all users) and this should be done through welfare funding channels rather than transit funding channels. This better protects the funding source since politicians and administrators would have to overtly remove welfare from those who need it, at risk of heavy political backlash. 3) Cheap fares require heavy subsidies, and these inevitably tend to keep growing. The transit is then totally at the mercy of the funder. Sooner or later, an administration will come in who decides to cut the subsidy program. They can dress it up in many ways - national austerity measures, correct 'inefficiency and profligacy' (as Eric quotes), moving to a user-pays principle, etc., etc. - we are all familiar with these dreaded sea-changes. Tariffs increase dramatically, services are thinned out and quieter routes closed, customer support programs are slashed, investment is put on hold, quality programs are shelved, important management functions are shut down, and confrontation arises with labour as hard measures are forced through. Patronage is lost, good working relationships are lost, the development effort of a few decades goes down the drain, and the innovators and developers in the management team are pushed aside for the bean-counters. Instability and down-sizing kill user confidence in a way that takes decades to recover. Chicago seems to be yet another example of the vulnerability of transit once subsidy becomes a significant part of its income stream. I have no moral or economic argument against subsidy for transit - the more public funds the better, if used wisely. However, it is a Faustian Pact, and a day of reckoning eventually comes. Transit planners and managers should think long and hard about the bargains they enter - they owe it to their customers, their city and their workers. With best wishes, Brendan. _____________________________________________________________________________________ >From Brendan Finn, ETTS Ltd. e-mail : etts@indigo.ie tel : +353.87.2530286 ----- Original Message ----- From: eric.britton@free.fr To: sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM Subject: [sustran] Chicago Transit Fare Hike Dear Sujit and Sustran friends, Don't think that our Chicago CTA friends have made these moves with joy in their hearts. The fact is that they have been trapped by state legislators (many of whom have their power base in rural and small town areas) who have decided to, in a phrase, "punish the CTA for their inefficiency and profligacy". Typically "old mobility" and terribly wrong headed, but if this were only the only city and agency that this kind of thing were to take place this would be a happier planet. In point of fact I have just come back from a lively week on brainstorming session with a group of more than forty experts and agencies around the table, where we gave our full attention to the possibility of "Reinventing Transport in Chicago". You can see more of that if interested in our New Mobility/Climate Emergency Project at www.climate.newmobility.org , where I hope shortly to post some useful information on these sessions. In the meantime, you may fond some us in the "Workpad" that you will find on the bottom left menu of this site in process. Eric Britton 1 September 2007 While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about Chicago. I was under the impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in providing transit facilities. -- Sujit Here is the news:- To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services-to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into effect on September 16th. -------------------------------------------------------- From chriskost at gmail.com Sun Sep 2 00:19:59 2007 From: chriskost at gmail.com (Christopher Kost) Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 11:19:59 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Chicago Transit Fare Hike In-Reply-To: <00fb01c7ec95$7d3dc1b0$3201a8c0@finn> References: <671479417CDD45A687C1238F3C4B80CA@joey> <00fb01c7ec95$7d3dc1b0$3201a8c0@finn> Message-ID: Brendan, You raise good points, but the assumption that the transit-dependent can pay more than cheap is problematic. At least in the U.S., many public transport users are very poor. In Los Angeles, the median household income for bus riders is $12,000. (The median household income in the city as a whole is $43,000.) A family with that income buying, say, two adult monthly passes and two student passes will end up spending a similar proportion of its income on transportation to that spent by those who own cars. So even the current "low" fares aren't giving poor people much of a break. I agree that the first-best solution would be to use welfare channels, but that's difficult in the current political climate in the U.S., so in the meantime I think it makes sense to keep fares low. Regards, chris On Sep 1, 2007, at 8:41 AM, Brendan Finn wrote: > Dear Eric, Sujit, > > I have argued many times against cheap fare policies (i.e. > deliberate under-pricing) and that transit should be as close to > self-financing as it can achieve. I have argued three main points : > > 1) All choice users and many non-choice users have the > affordability to pay more than "cheap", and most would be willing > to do so for better quality. Under-priced transit uses up the > available funds for wealth-transfer, leaving little for quality > improvements or reinvestment. Public funds should be spent on > service, quality and infrastructure, not on low fares. > > 2) The vulnerable within society can be supported by subsidising > transit passes for them (rather than for all users) and this should > be done through welfare funding channels rather than transit > funding channels. This better protects the funding source since > politicians and administrators would have to overtly remove welfare > from those who need it, at risk of heavy political backlash. > > 3) Cheap fares require heavy subsidies, and these inevitably tend > to keep growing. The transit is then totally at the mercy of the > funder. Sooner or later, an administration will come in who decides > to cut the subsidy program. They can dress it up in many ways - > national austerity measures, correct 'inefficiency and > profligacy' (as Eric quotes), moving to a user-pays principle, > etc., etc. - we are all familiar with these dreaded sea-changes. > Tariffs increase dramatically, services are thinned out and quieter > routes closed, customer support programs are slashed, investment is > put on hold, quality programs are shelved, important management > functions are shut down, and confrontation arises with labour as > hard measures are forced through. Patronage is lost, good working > relationships are lost, the development effort of a few decades > goes down the drain, and the innovators and developers in the > management team are pushed aside for the bean-counters. Instability > and down-sizing kil > l user confidence in a way that takes decades to recover. > > Chicago seems to be yet another example of the vulnerability of > transit once subsidy becomes a significant part of its income > stream. I have no moral or economic argument against subsidy for > transit - the more public funds the better, if used wisely. > However, it is a Faustian Pact, and a day of reckoning eventually > comes. Transit planners and managers should think long and hard > about the bargains they enter - they owe it to their customers, > their city and their workers. > > With best wishes, > > > Brendan. > ______________________________________________________________________ > _______________ >> From Brendan Finn, ETTS Ltd. e-mail : etts@indigo.ie tel : >> +353.87.2530286 > ----- Original Message ----- > From: eric.britton@free.fr > To: sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org > Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM > Subject: [sustran] Chicago Transit Fare Hike > > > Dear Sujit and Sustran friends, > > Don't think that our Chicago CTA friends have made these moves > with joy in their hearts. The fact is that they have been trapped > by state legislators (many of whom have their power base in rural > and small town areas) who have decided to, in a phrase, "punish the > CTA for their inefficiency and profligacy". Typically "old > mobility" and terribly wrong headed, but if this were only the only > city and agency that this kind of thing were to take place this > would be a happier planet. > > In point of fact I have just come back from a lively week on > brainstorming session with a group of more than forty experts and > agencies around the table, where we gave our full attention to the > possibility of "Reinventing Transport in Chicago". You can see > more of that if interested in our New Mobility/Climate Emergency > Project at www.climate.newmobility.org www.climate.newmobility.org/> , where I hope shortly to post some > useful information on these sessions. > > In the meantime, you may fond some us in the "Workpad" that you > will find on the bottom left menu of this site in process. > > Eric Britton > > 1 September 2007 > > While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by > the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about > Chicago. I was under the > impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in > providing transit facilities. > -- > > Sujit > > Here is the news:- > > To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit > Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services- > to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak > train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak > hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel > pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to > $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into > effect on September 16th. > -------------------------------------------------------- > -------------------------------------------------------- > IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via > YAHOOGROUPS. > > Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran- > discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership > rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' > there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the > yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the > confusing arrangement. > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing > countries (the 'Global South'). From edelman at greenidea.info Sun Sep 2 22:51:09 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:51:09 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Re: Chicago Transit Fare Hike In-Reply-To: References: <671479417CDD45A687C1238F3C4B80CA@joey> <00fb01c7ec95$7d3dc1b0$3201a8c0@finn> Message-ID: <46DABFCD.9010506@greenidea.info> ... and what about private transport being self-financing as a pre-condition or part of the same plan? Hmmm.... guess it would have to be part of a package lowering income taxes significantly at the same time.... - T Christopher Kost wrote: > Brendan, > > You raise good points, but the assumption that the transit-dependent > can pay more than cheap is problematic. > > At least in the U.S., many public transport users are very poor. In > Los Angeles, the median household income for bus riders is $12,000. > (The median household income in the city as a whole is $43,000.) A > family with that income buying, say, two adult monthly passes and two > student passes will end up spending a similar proportion of its > income on transportation to that spent by those who own cars. So even > the current "low" fares aren't giving poor people much of a break. > > I agree that the first-best solution would be to use welfare > channels, but that's difficult in the current political climate in > the U.S., so in the meantime I think it makes sense to keep fares low. > > > Regards, > chris > > > > On Sep 1, 2007, at 8:41 AM, Brendan Finn wrote: > > >> Dear Eric, Sujit, >> >> I have argued many times against cheap fare policies (i.e. >> deliberate under-pricing) and that transit should be as close to >> self-financing as it can achieve. I have argued three main points : >> >> 1) All choice users and many non-choice users have the >> affordability to pay more than "cheap", and most would be willing >> to do so for better quality. Under-priced transit uses up the >> available funds for wealth-transfer, leaving little for quality >> improvements or reinvestment. Public funds should be spent on >> service, quality and infrastructure, not on low fares. >> >> 2) The vulnerable within society can be supported by subsidising >> transit passes for them (rather than for all users) and this should >> be done through welfare funding channels rather than transit >> funding channels. This better protects the funding source since >> politicians and administrators would have to overtly remove welfare >> from those who need it, at risk of heavy political backlash. >> >> 3) Cheap fares require heavy subsidies, and these inevitably tend >> to keep growing. The transit is then totally at the mercy of the >> funder. Sooner or later, an administration will come in who decides >> to cut the subsidy program. They can dress it up in many ways - >> national austerity measures, correct 'inefficiency and >> profligacy' (as Eric quotes), moving to a user-pays principle, >> etc., etc. - we are all familiar with these dreaded sea-changes. >> Tariffs increase dramatically, services are thinned out and quieter >> routes closed, customer support programs are slashed, investment is >> put on hold, quality programs are shelved, important management >> functions are shut down, and confrontation arises with labour as >> hard measures are forced through. Patronage is lost, good working >> relationships are lost, the development effort of a few decades >> goes down the drain, and the innovators and developers in the >> management team are pushed aside for the bean-counters. Instability >> and down-sizing kil >> l user confidence in a way that takes decades to recover. >> >> Chicago seems to be yet another example of the vulnerability of >> transit once subsidy becomes a significant part of its income >> stream. I have no moral or economic argument against subsidy for >> transit - the more public funds the better, if used wisely. >> However, it is a Faustian Pact, and a day of reckoning eventually >> comes. Transit planners and managers should think long and hard >> about the bargains they enter - they owe it to their customers, >> their city and their workers. >> >> With best wishes, >> >> >> Brendan. >> ______________________________________________________________________ >> _______________ >> >>> From Brendan Finn, ETTS Ltd. e-mail : etts@indigo.ie tel : >>> +353.87.2530286 >>> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: eric.britton@free.fr >> To: sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org >> Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM >> Subject: [sustran] Chicago Transit Fare Hike >> >> >> Dear Sujit and Sustran friends, >> >> Don't think that our Chicago CTA friends have made these moves >> with joy in their hearts. The fact is that they have been trapped >> by state legislators (many of whom have their power base in rural >> and small town areas) who have decided to, in a phrase, "punish the >> CTA for their inefficiency and profligacy". Typically "old >> mobility" and terribly wrong headed, but if this were only the only >> city and agency that this kind of thing were to take place this >> would be a happier planet. >> >> In point of fact I have just come back from a lively week on >> brainstorming session with a group of more than forty experts and >> agencies around the table, where we gave our full attention to the >> possibility of "Reinventing Transport in Chicago". You can see >> more of that if interested in our New Mobility/Climate Emergency >> Project at www.climate.newmobility.org > www.climate.newmobility.org/> , where I hope shortly to post some >> useful information on these sessions. >> >> In the meantime, you may fond some us in the "Workpad" that you >> will find on the bottom left menu of this site in process. >> >> Eric Britton >> >> 1 September 2007 >> >> While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by >> the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about >> Chicago. I was under the >> impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in >> providing transit facilities. >> -- >> >> Sujit >> >> Here is the news:- >> >> To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit >> Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services- >> to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak >> train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak >> hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel >> pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to >> $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into >> effect on September 16th. >> -------------------------------------------------------- >> -------------------------------------------------------- >> IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via >> YAHOOGROUPS. >> >> Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran- >> discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership >> rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' >> there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the >> yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the >> confusing arrangement. >> >> ================================================================ >> SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, >> equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing >> countries (the 'Global South'). >> > > -------------------------------------------------------- > IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via YAHOOGROUPS. > > Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement. > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). > > -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net From eric.britton at free.fr Mon Sep 3 16:35:06 2007 From: eric.britton at free.fr (eric.britton at free.fr) Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 09:35:06 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Reinventing Transport in Cities: Pillar 1- Public transport should be free Message-ID: <404D44BB0E904B1D93B876E2EED776B8@joey> With all due respect Brendan, and I do very much appreciate those three important points you bring up (see below), I really do believe that the time has come in which we have to set aside just about all of our traditional thinking and practices about how we finance and deliver transport in cities and in the process come up with a whole new game plan. The Chicago experience, so very typical in many respects, makes it clear above all to me that we simply cannot afford to tinker any longer with the old models, which clearly are not working by any of a thousand balanced criteria. The emerging new model, which many of us here are trying very hard to help bring out from the woodwork, the so-called New Mobility Agenda, is predicated on an entirely different set of assumptions, one of them being that a whole dynamic range of seamless "non-own-car" services are needed, that these can and will be provided by a much broader spectrum of players than in the old binary mobility model, and that one of these has to be a basic underpinning of available-to-all public services which are in effect a "free" or at the very least a fully seamless public utility. And yes of course I am well aware of the abuses that such free services can lead to, and this note will not be the place to elaborate or to defend the basic concept. I might add however that in my view at least the services should not be altogether free, since it is important for many reasons to have full feedback about system use and patronage trends, etc., which means some kind of smart card, and this it seems to me to be fair and good to ask people to pay for. The end goal has to be to get the very great majority of private cars out of the city, and in order to achieve that we are going to have to provide "better than car" mobility systems. Hop-on, hop-off transit is part of this necessary package, an essential foundation stone for the rest. How to pay for it? How to deliver it? And how do you, how do we assure the necessary rigors of good management? What other kinds of services are needed to fill out the mobility spectrum, and what do we need to do to we get them on board? These are the kinds of question that we should be asking ourselves. And finding cities and city leaders who want to get involved in making this new model of transport and society. This has to be a teamwork undertaking Eric Britton PS. Some of you may wish to check out our in-process Reinventing Transport in Cities site at www.climate.newmobility.org . In addition to the Workpad examples, more will appear there shortly on the on-going Chicago rethink. -----Original Message----- On Behalf Of Brendan Finn Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 2:42 PM Dear Eric, Sujit, I have argued many times against cheap fare policies (i.e. deliberate under-pricing) and that transit should be as close to self-financing as it can achieve. I have argued three main points: 1) All choice users and many non-choice users have the affordability to pay more than "cheap", and most would be willing to do so for better quality. Under-priced transit uses up the available funds for wealth-transfer, leaving little for quality improvements or reinvestment. Public funds should be spent on service, quality and infrastructure, not on low fares. 2) The vulnerable within society can be supported by subsidising transit passes for them (rather than for all users) and this should be done through welfare funding channels rather than transit funding channels. This better protects the funding source since politicians and administrators would have to overtly remove welfare from those who need it, at risk of heavy political backlash. 3) Cheap fares require heavy subsidies, and these inevitably tend to keep growing. The transit is then totally at the mercy of the funder. Sooner or later, an administration will come in who decides to cut the subsidy program. They can dress it up in many ways - national austerity measures, correct 'inefficiency and profligacy' (as Eric quotes), moving to a user-pays principle, etc., etc. - we are all familiar with these dreaded sea-changes. Tariffs increase dramatically, services are thinned out and quieter routes closed, customer support programs are slashed, investment is put on hold, quality programs are shelved, important management functions are shut down, and confrontation arises with labour as hard measures are forced through. Patronage is lost, good working relationships are lost, the development effort of a few decades goes down the drain, and the innovators and developers in the management team are pushed aside for the bean-counters. Instability and down-sizing kill user confidence in a way that takes decades to recover. Chicago seems to be yet another example of the vulnerability of transit once subsidy becomes a significant part of its income stream. I have no moral or economic argument against subsidy for transit - the more public funds the better, if used wisely. However, it is a Faustian Pact, and a day of reckoning eventually comes. Transit planners and managers should think long and hard about the bargains they enter - they owe it to their customers, their city and their workers. With best wishes, Brendan. _________________________________________________________________________ ----- Original Message ----- From: eric.britton@free.fr Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM Dear Sujit and Sustran friends, Don't think that our Chicago CTA friends have made these moves with joy in their hearts. The fact is that they have been trapped by state legislators (many of whom have their power base in rural and small town areas) who have decided to, in a phrase, "punish the CTA for their inefficiency and profligacy". Typically "old mobility" and terribly wrong headed, but if this were only the only city and agency that this kind of thing were to take place this would be a happier planet. In point of fact I have just come back from a lively week on brainstorming session with a group of more than forty experts and agencies around the table, where we gave our full attention to the possibility of "Reinventing Transport in Chicago". You can see more of that if interested in our New Mobility/Climate Emergency Project at www.climate.newmobility.org , where I hope shortly to post some useful information on these sessions. In the meantime, you may fond some us in the "Workpad" that you will find on the bottom left menu of this site in process. Eric Britton ----- Original Message ----- From: Sujit Patwardhan Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about Chicago. I was under the impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in providing transit facilities. -- Sujit Here is the news:- To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services-to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into effect on September 16th. From chuwasg at yahoo.com Mon Sep 3 17:37:27 2007 From: chuwasg at yahoo.com (chuwa) Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 01:37:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [sustran] Peak oil and sustainable transportation Message-ID: <472447.21382.qm@web36912.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Sorry if this is off-topic. I chanced upon into this article "Life After the Oil Crash" http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/, which talks about the inevitable impact of "Peak Oil" effect. It give me a new sense of urgency to switch to (energy) sustainable way of living, including mode of transportation. The author suggested, big oil companies and automotive related industries are "desperate" to find means to continue their unsustainable business model. Sooner or later, the hard limit (Peak Oil) will hit and there will be no escape. Quick switch over to sustainable transportation should help to soften the negative of "Peak Oil". Ironical but may be true, giving up automotive industry can help to extend the life of oil companies. From etts at indigo.ie Mon Sep 3 17:47:50 2007 From: etts at indigo.ie (Brendan Finn) Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 09:47:50 +0100 Subject: [sustran] Re: Reinventing Transport in Cities: Pillar 1- Public transport should be free References: <404D44BB0E904B1D93B876E2EED776B8@joey> Message-ID: <015701c7ee07$1c7267f0$3201a8c0@finn> Dear Eric, I think we are at cross-purposes here. Let me spell out the two main concerns I have about free or under-priced transit : 1) Sooner or later, an incoming government will change the ground rules and either pull the funding or deregulate the market, with devastating and long-lasting effect. The only question is whether it will be a drastic shock, or death by a thousand cuts. The issue is vulnerability caused by dependency, and the history of urban areas and public transport is littered with such casualties. 2) Funding free public transport is very inefficient, since a huge amount of money is required just to keep basic services going. But most users have the affordability and willingness to pay fares, especially for a good quality product. (Perhaps the USA is an exception, if only the socially marginalised ride the bus). For example, if bus services in Dublin were free, it would require an annual subsidy of over $200 million just to keep the current service working. Nonetheless, the money is gone just to give them what they have already (and grumble about). Consider, by contrast, the dramatic impact of the same $200 million annually spent on a combination of BRT and bus-lanes, short-term subsidy to launch new routes, more buses to guarantee a seat, customer-care programs, subsidy for revenue losses due to fare integration. Spend the money where it has the most impact, both on the quality of service and capturing the public's attention. Today's public transport already costs money. If you want 'better than car', it's going to cost an awful lot more. People are willing to pay for everything else - bread, shoes, electricity, going to the movies. Finding a balance between what the user pays, and who pays for what (users pay for operations, society invests in infrastructure and improvements) is not 'old-thinking', it's in line with everything else in life. With best wishes, Brendan. _____________________________________________________________________________________ >From Brendan Finn, ETTS Ltd. e-mail : etts@indigo.ie tel : +353.87.2530286 ----- Original Message ----- From: eric.britton@free.fr To: Sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org ; NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com Cc: Brendan Finn (bfinn@singnet.com.sg) ; Brendan Finn (etts@indigo.ie) ; Peter Ekenger ; Amy Malick ; Karl Peet ; WorldTransport@yahoogroups.com ; sujit@vsnl.com Sent: Monday, September 03, 2007 8:35 AM Subject: Reinventing Transport in Cities: Pillar 1- Public transport should be free With all due respect Brendan, and I do very much appreciate those three important points you bring up (see below), I really do believe that the time has come in which we have to set aside just about all of our traditional thinking and practices about how we finance and deliver transport in cities and in the process come up with a whole new game plan. The Chicago experience, so very typical in many respects, makes it clear above all to me that we simply cannot afford to tinker any longer with the old models, which clearly are not working by any of a thousand balanced criteria. The emerging new model, which many of us here are trying very hard to help bring out from the woodwork, the so-called New Mobility Agenda, is predicated on an entirely different set of assumptions, one of them being that a whole dynamic range of seamless "non-own-car" services are needed, that these can and will be provided by a much broader spectrum of players than in the old binary mobility model, and that one of these has to be a basic underpinning of available-to-all public services which are in effect a "free" or at the very least a fully seamless public utility. And yes of course I am well aware of the abuses that such free services can lead to, and this note will not be the place to elaborate or to defend the basic concept. I might add however that in my view at least the services should not be altogether free, since it is important for many reasons to have full feedback about system use and patronage trends, etc., which means some kind of smart card, and this it seems to me to be fair and good to ask people to pay for. The end goal has to be to get the very great majority of private cars out of the city, and in order to achieve that we are going to have to provide "better than car" mobility systems. Hop-on, hop-off transit is part of this necessary package, an essential foundation stone for the rest. How to pay for it? How to deliver it? And how do you, how do we assure the necessary rigors of good management? What other kinds of services are needed to fill out the mobility spectrum, and what do we need to do to we get them on board? These are the kinds of question that we should be asking ourselves. And finding cities and city leaders who want to get involved in making this new model of transport and society. This has to be a teamwork undertaking Eric Britton PS. Some of you may wish to check out our in-process Reinventing Transport in Cities site at www.climate.newmobility.org. In addition to the Workpad examples, more will appear there shortly on the on-going Chicago rethink. -----Original Message----- On Behalf Of Brendan Finn Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 2:42 PM Dear Eric, Sujit, I have argued many times against cheap fare policies (i.e. deliberate under-pricing) and that transit should be as close to self-financing as it can achieve. I have argued three main points: 1) All choice users and many non-choice users have the affordability to pay more than "cheap", and most would be willing to do so for better quality. Under-priced transit uses up the available funds for wealth-transfer, leaving little for quality improvements or reinvestment. Public funds should be spent on service, quality and infrastructure, not on low fares. 2) The vulnerable within society can be supported by subsidising transit passes for them (rather than for all users) and this should be done through welfare funding channels rather than transit funding channels. This better protects the funding source since politicians and administrators would have to overtly remove welfare from those who need it, at risk of heavy political backlash. 3) Cheap fares require heavy subsidies, and these inevitably tend to keep growing. The transit is then totally at the mercy of the funder. Sooner or later, an administration will come in who decides to cut the subsidy program. They can dress it up in many ways - national austerity measures, correct 'inefficiency and profligacy' (as Eric quotes), moving to a user-pays principle, etc., etc. - we are all familiar with these dreaded sea-changes. Tariffs increase dramatically, services are thinned out and quieter routes closed, customer support programs are slashed, investment is put on hold, quality programs are shelved, important management functions are shut down, and confrontation arises with labour as hard measures are forced through. Patronage is lost, good working relationships are lost, the development effort of a few decades goes down the drain, and the innovators and developers in the management team are pushed aside for the bean-counters. Instability and down-sizing kill user confidence in a way that takes decades to recover. Chicago seems to be yet another example of the vulnerability of transit once subsidy becomes a significant part of its income stream. I have no moral or economic argument against subsidy for transit - the more public funds the better, if used wisely. However, it is a Faustian Pact, and a day of reckoning eventually comes. Transit planners and managers should think long and hard about the bargains they enter - they owe it to their customers, their city and their workers. With best wishes, Brendan. _________________________________________________________________________ ----- Original Message ----- From: eric.britton@free.fr Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM Dear Sujit and Sustran friends, Don't think that our Chicago CTA friends have made these moves with joy in their hearts. The fact is that they have been trapped by state legislators (many of whom have their power base in rural and small town areas) who have decided to, in a phrase, "punish the CTA for their inefficiency and profligacy". Typically "old mobility" and terribly wrong headed, but if this were only the only city and agency that this kind of thing were to take place this would be a happier planet. In point of fact I have just come back from a lively week on brainstorming session with a group of more than forty experts and agencies around the table, where we gave our full attention to the possibility of "Reinventing Transport in Chicago". You can see more of that if interested in our New Mobility/Climate Emergency Project at www.climate.newmobility.org , where I hope shortly to post some useful information on these sessions. In the meantime, you may fond some us in the "Workpad" that you will find on the bottom left menu of this site in process. Eric Britton ----- Original Message ----- From: Sujit Patwardhan Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:10 AM While we feel encouraged by the excellent proposals initiated by the Mayor of New York, here is what I got from a friend about Chicago. I was under the impression that Chicago was one of the better cities in the US in providing transit facilities. -- Sujit Here is the news:- To make up for poor revenues in recent years, the Chicago Transit Authority's board has approved *fare hikes *and changes to services-to include the shutting down of 39 bus routes. Bus and off-peak train fares paid in cash will rise from $2 to $2.50. During peak hours, train fares will become $3. The price of the one-day travel pass will increase from $5 to $6; the seven-day pass from $20 to $23; and the 30-day pass from $75 to $84. The changes go into effect on September 16th. From eric.britton at free.fr Mon Sep 3 18:38:33 2007 From: eric.britton at free.fr (eric.britton at free.fr) Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 11:38:33 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Reinventing Transport in Cities: Pillar 1- Public transport should be free In-Reply-To: <015701c7ee07$1c7267f0$3201a8c0@finn> Message-ID: <56C90397FCEE421C8AA626BACF26C92D@joey> Dear Brendan, I don't want to get overly stuck on the world "free" here, a source probably of more heat than light,. So let me just pop in a few thinking points on this in an attempt to explore all this a bit more and perhaps more creatively; 1. Private cars do not "work" in most of our cities -- so the alternative mobility model should be based on other kinds of services, and specifically a rich range of travel options that together can provide "better than cars" access (and economics) to all concerned. 2. High quality service - which is what we need - is going to cost money. 3. Cities with mobility systems that work well have healthier local commerce, higher real estate values and tax bases than those that do not. 4. "Public transport" (more or less fixed route, fixed schedule services) should be as seamless as we can make it. This means that users should have easy access and that barriers such as fare boxes need to be removed. 5. Well working transport services of all kinds require tight information feedback loops, bringing us straight to smart cards of various types. 6. There are a growing number of cities around the world that are actually delivering free transit services today. And I am rather sure that these are not anomalies nor guilty of soviet-style inefficiencies. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-fare_public_transport for some more on this.. A bit rough but still a useful first point of reference if needed.)) 7. The Paris Carte Orange experience is one interesting experience to ponder (there are plenty of others but what is particularly interesting about the Carte is that it has been around for a long time and has in many ways shown the way). The Carte is financed through a number of revenue streams, of which the actual traveler contribution is less than half. 8. There are, as you and others point out, lots more poor people depending on public transit in most places (the usual captive riders) which certainly suggests that it would be unfair and potentially dangerous to hit them with the full bill for transit. And they deserve high quality transportation. 9. All of which suggest to me that we need to put on our thinking hats and really give attention to new ways of financing and accessing transport. Fortunately the present systems that we have in most places are so terribly expensive and so grossly underperforming on just about all bases, that it is in fact an easy model to improve on. What I am trying to get at here is that we will do very badly if we fail to take these points into account as we rethink our transportation arrangements . Which we very definitely should be doing. Best/Eric -----Original Message----- From: Brendan Finn [mailto:etts@indigo.ie] Sent: Monday, September 03, 2007 10:48 AM Subject: Re: Reinventing Transport in Cities: Pillar 1- Public transport should be free Dear Eric, I think we are at cross-purposes here. Let me spell out the two main concerns I have about free or under-priced transit : 1) Sooner or later, an incoming government will change the ground rules and either pull the funding or deregulate the market, with devastating and long-lasting effect. The only question is whether it will be a drastic shock, or death by a thousand cuts. The issue is vulnerability caused by dependency, and the history of urban areas and public transport is littered with such casualties. 2) Funding free public transport is very inefficient, since a huge amount of money is required just to keep basic services going. But most users have the affordability and willingness to pay fares, especially for a good quality product. (Perhaps the USA is an exception, if only the socially marginalised ride the bus). For example, if bus services in Dublin were free, it would require an annual subsidy of over $200 million just to keep the current service working. Nonetheless, the money is gone just to give them what they have already (and grumble about). Consider, by contrast, the dramatic impact of the same $200 million annually spent on a combination of BRT and bus-lanes, short-term subsidy to launch new routes, more buses to guarantee a seat, customer-care programs, subsidy for revenue losses due to fare integration. Spend the money where it has the most impact, both on the quality of service and capturing the public's attention. Today's public transport already costs money. If you want 'better than car', it's going to cost an awful lot more. People are willing to pay for everything else - bread, shoes, electricity, going to the movies. Finding a balance between what the user pays, and who pays for what (users pay for operations, society invests in infrastructure and improvements) is not 'old-thinking', it's in line with everything else in life. With best wishes, Brendan. From gerd at tokiwa.ac.jp Wed Sep 5 10:15:11 2007 From: gerd at tokiwa.ac.jp (gerd) Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:15:11 +0900 Subject: [sustran] Passengers' Safety in Public Transport Message-ID: <46DE031F.5040405@tokiwa.ac.jp> Dear members, Please let me know when you are doing research on passengers' safety in public transport, especially in sexual molestation of commuting passengers. We are in the process of designing a research project and we would like to know who is active in the field. Friendly regards Gerd Ferdinand Kirchhoff -- Gerd Ferdinand Kirchhoff, Prof. Dr. jur. Professor of Victimology (Japan) Criminal Law - Criminology - Victimology ( em., Germany) Graduate School of Victimology and Tokiwa International Victimology Institute Tokiwa University Mito 1 430 1 Miwa, Mito shi, Ibaraki ken, Japan 3108585 phone +81 29 232 2865 ( or 2796) fax +81 29 232 2522 email gerd@tokiwa ac.jp From c_bradshaw at rogers.com Wed Sep 5 22:06:49 2007 From: c_bradshaw at rogers.com (Chris Bradshaw) Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 09:06:49 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: [NewMobilityCafe] Reinventing Transport in Cities: Pillar 1- Public transport should be free References: <404D44BB0E904B1D93B876E2EED776B8@joey> Message-ID: <077401c7efbd$a1499540$0202a8c0@acer56fb35423d> If our goal is "new mobility", we cannot give a "pass" to transit, either to defend the status quo or suggest that everything would improved if it were free. We don't want to fall into a kind of thinking I call "transit correctness." I was a bit surprised to here the terms "transit-captive" and "transit-choice" uncritically mentioned. This, of course means those _without_ a car of their own and those _with_ a car of their own. In reality, it is the car-owner who lacks freedom. To wit: Yeates: > ... the car still costs a lot in fixed costs if left in the garage, but that is the result of having cheap petrol and high fixed costs, rather than the other way round. It is this misbalance between high fixed costs and low variable costs that makes a car-owner work so hard to not leave home without it (and actually fears being further than 50 m from his). And since car-access is a monopoly for private-ownership rather than sharing, people don't have a choice to own just a "little" car. We should be thinking about dividing the poipulation into the the "car-captive" and the "car-choice," or between living car-dependent and living car-lite. I agree that transit should pay its own way, but only if the car pays its own way as well. The only way the latter will happen is if we move to a shared-car regime, in which, naturally, the costs are almost all variable, so that each use of the car is to be resisted. Further, a shared-car regime provides little need for the car-travel that is stimuated by the need to take a car with you in order to have it available if a need arises, since shared cars are available everywhere. With the high-tech components carshare organizations naturally add to their cars, it is easy to charge users peak-hour congestion charges, area-congestion charges, and to limit speeding and other congestion-exacerbating behaviour (illegally turning left, blocking drivers behind). And it will allow for one-way uses and spontaneous ride-sharing (as opposed to the stodgy risesharing for regular commutes) that could allow transfers between rideshare vehicles and transit. (And, it would provide on-demand car-access to the people who have arrived at the job without a personal car!) If that could happen, bus service to the suburbs (residences and business "parks") could be replaced by ridesharing in these types of vehicles. Such a scenario would mean that transit in the city core would, as Jane Jacobs suggested in her last book, Dark Age Ahead, not need subsidy at all, and the other service would be totally privately provided by carshare organizations (CSOs). I am presenting this vision -- and its contributions to walkability -- to WALK21 in Toronto in early October. Chris Bradshaw Ottawa From litman at vtpi.org Thu Sep 6 22:52:56 2007 From: litman at vtpi.org (Todd Alexander Litman) Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:52:56 -0700 Subject: [sustran] VTPI NEWS - Summer 2007 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20070906065239.0764cb98@mail.islandnet.com> ----------- VTPI NEWS ----------- Victoria Transport Policy Institute "Efficiency - Equity - Clarity" ------------------------------------- Summer 2007 Vol. 10, No. 3 ----------------------------------- The Victoria Transport Policy Institute is an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transportation problems. The VTPI website (http://www.vtpi.org ) has many resources addressing a wide range of transport planning and policy issues. VTPI also provides consulting services. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ONLINE TDM ENCYCLOPEDIA ======================== The VTPI "Online TDM Encyclopedia" (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm ) is a comprehensive information resource to help identify and evaluate innovative management solutions to transport problems, available for free on our website. Many of the chapters have recently been updated with new information. The Encyclopedia has a new feature titled, "Organizations and Stakeholder Groups" (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/index.php#stakeholders ). This section indicates the best mobility management strategies for various types of organizations and stakeholder groups, including businesses, and local, state/provincial and federal government agencies. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SMART TRANSPORTATION EMISSION REDUCTIONS ==================================== Many governments and organizations are now evaluating climate change emission reduction options. There are many possible ways to reduce transportation emissions, but some provide far more total benefits than others. Emission reduction strategies that reduce vehicle travel also reduce congestion, roadway and parking costs, accidents and sprawl. "Win-Win Transportation Solutions" are cost-effective, technically feasible market reforms that help solve transportation problems by improving mobility options and removing market distortions that stimulate excessive motor vehicle travel. They provide many economic, social and environmental benefits. If implemented to the degree economically justified, our analysis indicates that Win-Win solutions could achieve the transport component of Kyoto emission reduction targets while supporting other economic and social objectives. Critics are wrong to claim that meeting emission reduction goals would harm the economy: by choosing the right strategies we can achieve both environmental goals and economic development goals. However, conventional tends to consider a limited set of impacts and so tends to undervalue Win-Win strategies. Only by applying more comprehensive analysis can their full benefits be recognized. VTPI has updated its reports concerning Win-Win strategies. For more information: "Win-Win Emission Reduction Strategies: Smart Transportation Strategies Can Achieve Emission Reduction Targets And Provide Other Important Economic, Social and Environmental Benefits," (http://www.vtpi.org/wwclimate.pdf ) "Win-Win Transportation Solutions: Cooperation for Economic, Social and Environmental Benefits," (http://www.vtpi.org/winwin.pdf ) "Efficient Vehicles Versus Efficient Transportation: Comparing Transportation Energy Conservation Strategies," (http://www.vtpi.org/cafe.pdf ). NEW DOCUMENTS ============== "Guide To Calculating Mobility Management Benefits" (http://www.vtpi.org/tdmben.pdf ) This Guide provides instructions for estimating the benefits of a specific Mobility Management (also called Transportation Demand Management or TDM) strategy or program. "Evaluating Accessibility for Transportation Planning" (http://www.vtpi.org/access.pdf ). This paper discusses the concept of 'accessibility' and how it can be incorporated in transport planning. Many factors affect accessibility, including mobility (physical movement), the quality and affordability of transport options, transport system connectivity, mobility substitutes, and land use patterns. More comprehensive analysis of accessibility in planning expands the scope of potential solutions to transport problems. "Build for Comfort, Not Just Speed: Valuing Service Quality Impacts In Transport Planning" (http://www.vtpi.org/quality.pdf ) This paper examines practical ways to evaluate qualitative transport improvements such as increased convenience, comfort and security in transport planning. Conventional transport planning and evaluation practices tend to focus on quantitative impacts and undervalue qualitative impacts. Improving qualitative analysis can expand the range of impacts and options considered in transport evaluation, leading to better planning decisions. "Evaluating Transportation Affordability" (http://www.vtpi.org/affordability.pdf ) This paper investigates the concept of 'transportation affordability,' its importance to society, how to evaluate it for transport planning, and practical ways to improve it. Conventional planning tends to consider a relatively limited range of transport affordability impacts and objectives. More comprehensive analysis can help decision makers better understand affordability impacts and identify more effective strategies for improving transport affordability. "Pay-As-You-Drive Pricing in British Columbia: Backgrounder" (http://www.vtpi.org/paydbc.pdf ). Pay-As-You-Drive (PAYD) pricing means that a vehicle?s insurance premiums and registration fees are based directly on the amount it is driven. PAYD pricing is particularly appropriate in British Columbia because the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) insures all vehicles in the province and has a mandate to maximize social benefits, including traffic safety, insurance affordability and emission reductions (due to the province?s aggressive climate change emission reduction targets). This short paper describes PAYD, summarizes its history in BC, and describes how PAYD pricing can help achieve provincial objectives. This is part of a new campaign to encourage ICBC to implement a PAYD pilot project to evaluate the concept. "Designing Pay-Per-Mile Auto Insurance Regulatory Incentives Using the NHTSA Light Truck CAFE Rule as a Model" (http://www.vtpi.org/07-3457.pdf ), by Allen Greenberg This paper, presented at the 2007 Transportation Research Board annual meeting, describes the concept of Pay-As-You-Drive-And-You-Save (PAYDAYS) insurance, which converts premiums into distance-based fees, and evaluates its value as an energy conservation strategy based on the method used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to develop new fuel economy rules for light trucks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ UPDATED DOCUMENTS ============== "Pavement Busters Guide: Why and How to Reduce the Amount of Land Paved for Roads and Parking Facilities," (www.vtpi.org/pavbust.pdf ) This guide identifies ways to reduce the amount of land devoted to roads and parking facilities. It identifies current policies and planning practices that unintentionally contribute to economically excessive road and parking requirements, and specific strategies for reducing the amount of land paved for roads and parking facilities. This analysis indicates that road and parking pavement area can often be reduced in ways that are cost effective and maintain adequate levels of accessibility. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ UPCOMING EVENTS ================ VTPI will participate in these upcoming events: 'A City Built for Everyone: A Sustainable, Equitable and Smart Transportation Forum,' Sustainable Calgary (http://www.sustainablecalgary.ca ) September 29, 2007, Calgary, Alberta 'WALK21 2007 - Putting Pedestrians First' (http://www.toronto.ca/walk21 ) October 1st To 4th, Toronto, Canada Walk21 Toronto 2007 is the 8th annual conference on walkable and livable communities. Monday, Oct. 1, all day workshop, 'Measuring walking: Towards internationally standardized monitoring methods of walking and public space' Wednesday, Oct. 3, 10:45-11:15, 'Economic Value of Walking' Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2:00-3:30, 'Can You Spy the Signs: How Walking with Children Can Change the World' (Suzanne Kort-Litman) Cotter Debate on Transportation Policy and the Environment (http://www.colby.edu/news_events/calendar ) Monday October 8, 2007, 7:00 p.m. Debate between Todd Litman (Victoria Transport Policy Institute) and Samuel Staley (Reason Foundation) Canadian TDM Summit (http://www.actcanada.com/EN/Conference2007 ) November 25-28, 2007, Calgary, Alberta ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ USEFUL RESOURCES ================= 'Sustainable Transportation Indicators Listserve' The Transportation Research Board?s Sustainable Transportation Indicators Subcommittee (ADD40[1]) now has an active listserve. We are currently working to develop recommendations for a preferred definition of sustainable transportation, and development of a recommended set of indicators, which could be adopted by TRB. This list is open to anybody interested in these issues. To subscribe, go to http://lists.cutr.usf.edu/read/?forum=sti . The GTZ "Sustainable Transport Sourcebook" is now available in HTML format (http://www.sutp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=566&Itemid=40&lang=en ). These versions are identical in content (and virtually identical in format) to the PDF versions, but easier to download with low band width Internet. "Bus Rapid Transit Planning Guide" (http://www.itdp.org/STe/ste24/new_pub.html ). After over two years of effort, 800 pages of text, and nearly 1000 images and graphics. The document is currently in English, but it will be translated to Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, and Indonesian. "Transit Oriented Development; Chapter 17, Travel Response To Transportation System Changes," (http://www.trb.org/TRBNet/ProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=1034 ), by John E. Evans and Richard H. Pratt. This latest volume of this comprehensive study of factors that affect travel behavior. It indicates that transit-oriented development can provide significant reductions in per capita vehicle ownership and use, and increase walking and public transit travel. "WalkScore" (http://www.WalkScore.com) automatically calculates a neighborhood?s walkability rating by identifying the distance to public services such as grocery stores and schools. It works for any street address in the United States of America and Canada, assigning points based on the distance to local amenities, using Google maps and business listings. "Economics of Travel Demand Management: Comparative Cost Effectiveness and Public Investment" (www.nctr.usf.edu/pdf/77704.pdf ). This document by the Center for Urban Transportation Research provides guidelines for applying benefit/cost analysis to mobility management programs. It describes TRIMMS (Trip Reduction Impacts for Mobility Management Strategies), a software program that automates economic evaluation. "Impact of Employer-based Programs on Transit System Ridership and Transportation System Performance," (http://www.nctr.usf.edu/pdf/77605.pdf). This study by the Center for Urban Transportation Research uses a traffic model to evaluate the impacts of Commute Trip Reduction programs on transportation system performance. It finds that such programs can provide significant reductions in traffic congestion delay and fuel consumption. "Getting Up To Speed (GUTS): A Conservationist?s Guide to Wildlife and Highways," (http://www.GettingUpToSpeed.org) provides a foundation for evaluating roadway environmental impacts and incorporating this information into transport planning. "Economic Benefits of Land Conservation" (www.tpl.org/content_documents/econbens_landconserve.pdf ). This document by the Trust for Public Lands describes how land conservation and parks can help communities grow smart, attract investment, revitalize cities, boost tourism, protect farms and ranches, prevent flood damage, and safeguard the environment. It includes monetized estimates of some impacts. "Portland?s Green Dividend," (http://www.ceosforcities.org/internal/files/PGD%20FINAL.pdf ), by Joe Cortright. This study by CEOs for Cities finds that as a result of innovative transportation and land use policies, Portland, Oregon area residents drive about 20% fewer annual miles and use alternative modes about twice as much as in comparable cities, and as a result enjoy various benefits, including more regional economic development, consumer cost savings, reduced air pollution, better health and more livable urban neighborhoods. Also see, 'Less driving is more cash for Portland' "The Oregonian" (http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1187576751202450.xml&coll=7 ) "Smart Parking Seminar ? Developing Policies for Your Community" (http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/smart_growth/parking_seminar.htm ), by the San Francisco region Metropolitan Transportation Commission. This website contains materials developed for a training seminar on parking policies to support smart growth. The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) has an excellent e-newsletter called Sustainable Transport (http://www.itdp.org/STe/index.html ). Ian W. H. Parry, Margaret Walls and Winston Harrington (2007), Automobile Externalities and Policies, (http://www.rff.org/rff/Documents/RFF-DP-06-26-REV.pdf ) This paper discusses the nature, and magnitude, of externalities associated with automobile use, including local and global pollution, oil dependence, traffic congestion and traffic accidents. It discusses current federal policies affecting these externalities, including fuel taxes, fuel-economy and emissions standards, and alternative fuel policies; discusses emerging pricing policies, including congestion tolls, and pay-as-you-drive insurance reform; and summarizes what appears to be the appropriate combination of policies to address automobile externalities. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Please let us know if you have comments or questions about any information in this newsletter, or if you would like to be removed from our email list. And please pass this newsletter on to others who may find it useful. Sincerely, Todd Alexander Litman Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org) litman@vtpi.org Phone & Fax 250-360-1560 1250 Rudlin Street, Victoria, BC, V8V 3R7, CANADA ?Efficiency - Equity - Clarity? From eric.britton at free.fr Sun Sep 9 15:43:40 2007 From: eric.britton at free.fr (eric.britton at free.fr) Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2007 08:43:40 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Reinventing Transport in Cities: 2007-2012 - collaborative project and invitation Message-ID: <6F638986C2E3473382D5AA919734F33A@joey> Dear Sustran friends, This is to inform you about our latest collaborative new mobility project: Reinventing Transport in Cities: 2007-2012. You will see it at - http://www.invent.newmobility.org . Why do I take your valuable time with this information this morning? Three reasons, in brief: * First, it is my hope that even as it stands (eternally incomplete and in process) I hope you will find it a useful resource in support of your own work. * Second, to invite your comments and suggestions for making it clearer and better. These you might want to pass on to me privately, and perhaps later I can provide a summary of these ideas and share them with the group as a whole. * And finally, because I would very much like to hope that in a few cases at least this might lead in time to a collaborative project, either perhaps in your city or region,, or via some kind of network or agency. That after all is what the whole things is about. The bottom line. If you would agree to share this with your colleagues and various lists and networks, and perhaps also some of our media friends - after all this is such a hot and important topic - well that would be much appreciated, There you have it. Grist I hope for your good mill. Let me know what you think we can do with this. With all good wishes, Eric Britton Reinventing Transportation in Cities - at http://www.invent.newmobility.org/ Europe : 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, 75006 Paris, France. T: +331 4326 1323 USA : 9440 Readcrest Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90210. T: +1 310 601-8468 E. eric.britton@ecoplan.org. E2. fekbritton@gmail.com Skype: newmobility The Commons: A wide open, world-wide open society forum concerned with improving our understanding and control of technology as it impacts on people in our daily lives. Seeking out and pioneering new transformational concepts for concerned citizens, activists, community groups, entrepreneurs and business. Supporting local government as that closest to the people and the problems. Increasing the uncomfort zone for hesitant administrators and politicians. And through our long term world wide collaborative efforts, energy and personal choices, placing them and ourselves firmly on the path to a more sustainable and more just world. From edelman at greenidea.info Sun Sep 9 23:51:07 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 16:51:07 +0200 Subject: [sustran] BRAZIL: Ethanol Divides Agribusiness Message-ID: <46E4085B.4050501@greenidea.info> *RIO VERDE, Brazil, Sep 8 (IPS/IFEJ) - The expansion of sugarcane farming to produce more ethanol in Brazil has run into unexpected resistance in Rio Verde, a prosperous town in the central state of Goi?s, and it is coming from agribusiness leaders. http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39191 * The local government, of the conservative Progressive Party, decided to impose a limit on sugarcane to 10 percent of the municipality's farmland. That represents 50,000 hectares, eight times the area already planted with sugarcane in Rio Verde, to supply an old distillery that produced fuel alcohol, or ethanol. The measure, demanded by agribusiness leaders, was proposed by Mayor Paulo Roberto Cunha and approved unanimously by the municipal Council. Sugarcane monoculture is "a green tsunami that is breaking the agribusiness productive chain" and causes "social tragedies" as well as environment problems if it is not controlled, Avelar Macedo, secretary of industry and commerce, and promoter of the restrictions, said in an interview. The municipal law, in force since September 2005, also prohibits planting sugarcane less than 50 meters from water sources and burning sugarcane chaff within 20 kilometres of urban areas, near environmentally protected areas or near power lines or highways. The union of local officials and business leaders defends the "diversified activities" that they say led to an average 30-percent economic growth in the municipality since 2001, according to the Commerce and Industry Association. Rio Verde has a soybean oil industry, whose by-product, the bran, is used as cattle feed. Maize supplies more than 1,600 poultry and hog farms, which in turn supply Perdig?o, a group that seven years ago set up the largest meat processing complex in Latin America and created 7,600 direct jobs, and 35,000 indirect jobs, according to Macedo. Sorghum, beans, rice and cotton are other important products for the municipality, generating a broad market for tractors, machinery, and other farm inputs. Agroindustry has also fomented the production of containers -- metal, plastic and cardboard. The result is a city of 136,000 people without obvious poverty -- nobody asking for money on the streets -- and many signs of prosperity, such as brisk commercial and banking activity on the main avenue. There are four university institutions, which draw students from nearby towns. This agro-industrial chain, "which adds value locally," is threatened by the "euphoria for ethanol," said Macedo. The sugarcane industry does not benefit the population because it mainly offers temporary, low-paid work, and generally purchases its machinery and inputs from foreign suppliers, he explained. Its expansion poses a threat because the farmers are "decapitalised" by low commodity prices and the unfavourable exchange on the dollar in the last few years, so they are more vulnerable to offers from sugarcane or ethanol producers to rent or buy their land, warned Macedo, who is himself a landowner and entrepreneur in the construction and tourism sectors. Sugarcane could bring progress in the northern part of Goi?s state, where there is an "economic vacuum", but the industry would rather take advantage of existing infrastructure in the south, where Rio Verde is located, he said. The law that turned Rio Verde into a national reference point, taken as an example by dozens of other municipality governments worried about monoculture, is being challenged in court by the Goi?s syndicate of alcohol manufacturers, SIFAEG. The group charges that the law is unconstitutional because it violates private property rights and infringes on national jurisdiction. The legal battle likely will last several years, agree both sides. Sugarcane is grown on 290,000 to 300,000 hectares in Goi?s, or just 0.8 percent of the state's territory, and with maximum expansion predicted to reach 2.0 percent, which is less than one-third of the area planted with soybeans, says SIFAEG president Igor Montenegro. In the next five years, 20 more distilleries could be added to the existing 18 in operation, "without threatening the grains". That expansion would require a small portion of the "immense area that could be freed up" by a simple improvement in livestock management, which currently covers 57 percent of Goi?s territory in "low-productivity pastures," he said. Montenegro hopes to counteract the "unfounded hysteria" among economic sectors that have nothing to fear "if they are competitive and profitable." The sugarcane agro-industry, he assures, is the one that "offers most jobs in agribusiness. One million direct and six million indirect" across Brazil. And they are less and less temporary and more skilled jobs, with an increasingly mechanised harvest, he added. In fact, it would not be necessary to deforest areas in order to expand cane fields or grain crops in Goi?s, agrees Emiliano Godoi, agronomist and head of biodiversity and forests for the state's environment secretariat. But the tradition is "to open new pastureland" instead of recovering the degraded land, which is why sugarcane is pushing the agricultural frontier into the forests. This is a threat to the Cerrado, the savannah of unique forests that cover a large part of central Brazil. It is a biome heavily affected by agricultural expansion but has received little attention in terms of knowledge about it and its conservation. In Goi?s, conservation areas make up just 4.9 percent of state territory, "which is very little, but five years ago it was just one percent," said Godoi. Furthermore, most municipalities fail to comply with legislation that requires maintaining at least 20 percent of land with its original, native vegetation intact. But his concern about sugarcane is "more social than environmental." During the harvest season, May to November, the small towns receive a flood of cane cutters who come from distant parts of the country, and there is a rise in prostitution and unplanned pregnancies. The burning of cane fields to facilitate cutting pollutes the air, which causes respiratory illnesses. The problems accumulate and overburden the services of city governments of limited resources, said Godoi. The pollution from the burning in Goi?s is more harmful than the air pollution in Sao Paulo state, Brazil's leading producer of sugar and alcohol, because the atmosphere of the Cerrado in these months is very dry and keeps the concentrated particulate material suspended longer, he said. In addition there is the particulate matter from the poor sanitation systems in most of the state's cities. (*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS-Inter Press Service and IFEJ-International Federation of Environmental Journalists.) (END/2007) -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net From carlosfpardo at gmail.com Tue Sep 11 01:39:20 2007 From: carlosfpardo at gmail.com (Carlos F. Pardo) Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:39:20 -0500 Subject: [sustran] Revised gender and urban transport module Message-ID: <46E57338.80309@gmail.com> Dear colleagues, Based on the feedback received from various professionals, and other comments on the gender and urban transport module, the authors have reviewed the document and have made important modifications to its full contents. Please go to our website to download the new version of the module (in section 7). You can access it from the address of our sourcebook: http://www.sutp.org/content/view/426/72/lang,uk/ Best regards, -- Carlos F. Pardo Coordinador de Proyecto- Project Coordinator GTZ - Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC) Cl 93A # 14-17 of 708 Bogot? D.C., Colombia Tel/fax: +57 (1) 236 2309 Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662 carlos.pardo@sutp.org www.sutp.org From edelman at greenidea.info Sat Sep 15 03:10:36 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:10:36 +0200 Subject: [sustran] BBC: Send in videos and photos which show how YOU commute to work Message-ID: <46EACE9C.2070206@greenidea.info> * How do you commute to work?* We want to see your videos of your daily commute. What is your commute like? For many it's a daily grind of crowded trains, trams and buses. For others it's a chance for contemplation, a bit of peace and quiet. The BBC is looking for videos and photos of people commuting to work, all over the world.We'll be using these pictures to create a special short film - made up entirely of content sent in by you. When it is ready we will show it on the BBC News website and on BBC World. See for how to send video, conditions, etc. -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net From edelman at greenidea.info Sun Sep 16 10:48:53 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2007 03:48:53 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Fwd: Re: Carfree Day in India? Message-ID: <46EC8B85.6010604@greenidea.info> Anyone have info on Carfree Day activities in India? See below... -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "J.H. Crawford" Subject: Fwd: Re: [carfree_cities] Carfree day Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 17:35:11 -0500 Size: 4772 Url: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20070916/b888d4e5/carfree_citiesCarfreeday.eml From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Mon Sep 17 16:00:35 2007 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (eric.britton) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:00:35 +0200 Subject: [sustran] GoLoco discussion and commentary (ride-sharing, digital hitchhiking) Message-ID: This is a discussion that is to take place over in the Lots Less Cars list. Thought it might interest some of you: * List address: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LotsLessCars/ * To post message: LotsLessCars@yahoogroups.com * To subscribe: LotsLessCars-subscribe@yahoogroups.com -----Original Message----- From: eric.britton [mailto:eric.britton@ecoplan.org] Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 8:28 AM To: 'LotsLessCars@yahoogroups.com' Subject: GoLoco discussion and commentary I propose a public discussion here of and invite your comments and suggestions on Robin Chase's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Chase ) new GoLoco ride-sharing service of which you have a brief introduction below and full information at www.goloco.org. GoLoco: How does it work? 1. Post a trip -- want to go to the beach? shopping? daily commute? out of town? -- for your friends, colleagues, or classmates to see. 2. View profiles of people whose trips match your own. Decide if you'd like to travel with them. 3. Accept a trip as is, or negotiate changes online. 4. Meet up at a specific location and time. You can use GoLoco to share rides for free. Or you can choose to share trip costs quickly and easily online before the trip without the awkward money discussion or exchange in the car. GoLoco collects each passenger's share of the total trip costs before the trip begins and transfers it to the driver using online accounts. We charge a 10 percent transaction fee. * * * I see GoLoco as one pioneering example of a very important class of new mobility services which we call xTransit (see www.xtransit.org ), and of course the sub-class ride-sharing. And within that, a further sub-class that we call "digital hitchhiking". The stack in our nomenclature, if you will, looks like this, from the more general at the top down then getting more specific. 1. Movement 2. Transport(ation), mobility, logistics 3. Sustainable transport 4. New mobility 5. xTransit 6. Ride-sharing 7. Digital hitchhiking By way of historical curiosity I thought some of you might be interested to see an early example of this last, in the form of a 1978 proposal form this end for a service which we then called CHARM: Computer-Helped Area-Wide Regional Mobility system, which I disinterred this morning and attach just in case you feel like a quick trip through a transportation/technology museum. I look forward very much to this discussion, and would ask you to share this note with others, and lists, who you think may share our interests. Eric Britton PS. It would be great if Robin might in parallel share with us any articles of thinkpeices she might have on her concept and implementation, including status information if available Again, all that over at Lots Less Cars. From lwright at vivacities.org Tue Sep 18 03:39:22 2007 From: lwright at vivacities.org (Lloyd Wright) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:39:22 -0500 Subject: [sustran] Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation Message-ID: <002001c7f95a$136be740$6500a8c0@Nikita> Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the bicycle to be a form of transporation... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827 The bicycle thief Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads. By Katharine Mieszkowski Photo: AP/Wide World Salon composite of Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters. Sept. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians! The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all. In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation." Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C. Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it? What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot." One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities. It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke. Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths." So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road. Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities." For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation." Lloyd Wright Executive Director Viva Robles 653 y Av. Amazonas Oficinas 601-602-603 Quito Ecuador Tel. +593 2 255 1492 Mobile +593 9 577 6500 Fax +44 871 263 8779 Email lwright@vivacities.org Web www.vivacities.org "Viva...changing the world one street at a time." From schipper at wri.org Tue Sep 18 03:47:41 2007 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:47:41 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation Message-ID: <46EE938D020000380001C3FA@HERMES.wri.org> Does this mean i can no longer cycle to meetings at DOT? >>> "Lloyd Wright" 09/17/07 2:39 PM >>> Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the bicycle to be a form of transporation... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827 The bicycle thief Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads. By Katharine Mieszkowski Photo: AP/Wide World Salon composite of Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters. Sept. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians! The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all. In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation." Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C. Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it? What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot." One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities. It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke. Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths." So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road. Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities." For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation." Lloyd Wright Executive Director Viva Robles 653 y Av. Amazonas Oficinas 601-602-603 Quito Ecuador Tel. +593 2 255 1492 Mobile +593 9 577 6500 Fax +44 871 263 8779 Email lwright@vivacities.org Web www.vivacities.org "Viva...changing the world one street at a time." From edelman at greenidea.info Tue Sep 18 04:13:56 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:13:56 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation In-Reply-To: <46EE938D020000380001C3FA@HERMES.wri.org> References: <46EE938D020000380001C3FA@HERMES.wri.org> Message-ID: <46EED1F4.5010609@greenidea.info> Hi Lee, It means that when you go to those meeting you should wear lycra, cycling shoes, expensive sunglasses, etc... to make a statement that cycling is only "sport"... - T Lee Schipper wrote: > Does this mean i can no longer cycle to meetings at DOT? > > >>>> "Lloyd Wright" 09/17/07 2:39 PM >>> >>>> > > Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the > bicycle to be a form of transporation... > > > http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827 > > > The bicycle thief > > > Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary > Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are > stealing tax money from bridges and roads. > > By Katharine Mieszkowski > > > > > > Photo: AP/Wide World > > Salon composite of Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters. > > Sept. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush > administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation > infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during > rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to > blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians! > > The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of > Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation > spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and > pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, > hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas > tax, money that should go to pave > highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, > apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of > transportation > infrastructure at all. > > In an Aug. 15 > _08-15.html> appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters > spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's > aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that > only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to > highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about > 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to > blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax > to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that > are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing > lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is > being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The > secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not > transportation." > > Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and > letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter > how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words > "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" > plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously > as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C. > > Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of > people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and > the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy > Clarke, executive director of the League > of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a > path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to > Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the > country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to > the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the > Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director > for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. > > In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to > fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all > U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and > bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual > traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We > represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a > minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of > the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco > Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, > with problems like global > warming, the obesity epidemic > and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation > be praising biking, not complaining about it? > > What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing > their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to > Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a > profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas > taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes > Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike > activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is > not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot." > > One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for > bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. > For the St. Paul, Minn., program > .html> Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by > Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 > million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect > existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage > to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the > cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 > percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the > national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program > director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities. > > It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing > federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money > they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state > departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge > funds to the federal government, according to the > Federal > Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of > bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent > suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke. > > Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike > paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have > all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, > communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and > Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of > money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths." > > So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments > are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation > in a speech at the > National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply > forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign > to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently > in the > 82401697.html> Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax > to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge > collapse is Democratic Rep. > Jim Oberstar of > Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his > district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters > is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road. > > Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike > paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say > that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states > have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not > respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of > Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the > Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one > resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set > high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and > interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local > communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation > priorities." > > For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines > for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike > paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco > Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will > be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for > transportation." > > > Lloyd Wright > Executive Director > Viva > Robles 653 y Av. Amazonas > Oficinas 601-602-603 > Quito > Ecuador > Tel. +593 2 255 1492 > Mobile +593 9 577 6500 > Fax +44 871 263 8779 > Email lwright@vivacities.org > Web www.vivacities.org > > "Viva...changing the world one street at a time." > > > -------------------------------------------------------- > IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via YAHOOGROUPS. > > Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement. > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). > > -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net From whook at itdp.org Tue Sep 18 04:17:04 2007 From: whook at itdp.org (Walter Hook) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:17:04 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation In-Reply-To: <46EE938D020000380001C3FA@HERMES.wri.org> Message-ID: <00c201c7f95f$55c01710$3601a8c0@DFJLYL81> This is an oversimplification of a complex debate on the hill. The stupid comment about bike paths not withstanding, I am glad she is criticizing earmarks, most of which are road pork. She has been pushing for more tolling and supportive of congestion charging, (fed support is key to our chances for nyc congestion charges, and democratic pork politicians like Oberstar and road lobby stalwarts like highway and transit subcommiteee chair democrat de fazio of Oregon tried to kill it. Oberstar is great on money for bike lanes but also presided over massive highway pork spending. To me the solution is a fix it first law modeled in new jersey that would restrict federal funding for new roads and bridges till the existing ones are all in a state of good repair. -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+whook=itdp.org@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+whook=itdp.org@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Lee Schipper Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 2:48 PM To: sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org; lwright@vivacities.org; carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation Does this mean i can no longer cycle to meetings at DOT? >>> "Lloyd Wright" 09/17/07 2:39 PM >>> Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the bicycle to be a form of transporation... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827 The bicycle thief Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads. By Katharine Mieszkowski Photo: AP/Wide World Salon composite of Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters. Sept. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians! The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all. In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation." Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C. Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it? What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot." One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities. It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke. Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths." So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road. Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities." For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation." Lloyd Wright Executive Director Viva Robles 653 y Av. Amazonas Oficinas 601-602-603 Quito Ecuador Tel. +593 2 255 1492 Mobile +593 9 577 6500 Fax +44 871 263 8779 Email lwright@vivacities.org Web www.vivacities.org "Viva...changing the world one street at a time." -------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via YAHOOGROUPS. Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). From ericbruun at verizon.net Tue Sep 18 06:34:57 2007 From: ericbruun at verizon.net (ericbruun at verizon.net) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:34:57 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [sustran] Funding solutions Message-ID: <25800101.16972081190064897556.JavaMail.root@vms061.mailsrvcs.net> Walter I doubt that laws prohibiting money to be spent on new construction until everything existing is up to standard would work. First, standards would be downgraded to allow them to be built. (This trick is already being used, the Minnesota bridge was judged borderline acceptable for years). Second, money is fungible, so that other money would be used for new construction instead, money that could otherwise go to transit, water supplies, schools, etc. (This trick is already being used, too.) Although it is almost impossible to get through Congress, a better solution would be to give federal funds to Metropolitan Planning Associations instead of to State governments. Eric Bruun From: Walter Hook Date: 2007/09/17 Mon PM 02:17:04 CDT To: 'Lee Schipper' , sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org, lwright@vivacities.org, carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com Cc: 'Michael Replogle' Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation This is an oversimplification of a complex debate on the hill. The stupid comment about bike paths not withstanding, I am glad she is criticizing earmarks, most of which are road pork. She has been pushing for more tolling and supportive of congestion charging, (fed support is key to our chances for nyc congestion charges, and democratic pork politicians like Oberstar and road lobby stalwarts like highway and transit subcommiteee chair democrat de fazio of Oregon tried to kill it. Oberstar is great on money for bike lanes but also presided over massive highway pork spending. To me the solution is a fix it first law modeled in new jersey that would restrict federal funding for new roads and bridges till the existing ones are all in a state of good repair. -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+whook=itdp.org@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+whook=itdp.org@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Lee Schipper Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 2:48 PM To: sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org; lwright@vivacities.org; carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation Does this mean i can no longer cycle to meetings at DOT? >>> "Lloyd Wright" 09/17/07 2:39 PM >>> Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the bicycle to be a form of transporation... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827 The bicycle thief Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads. By Katharine Mieszkowski Photo: AP/Wide World Salon composite of Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters. Sept. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians! The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all. In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation." Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C. Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it? What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot." One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities. It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke. Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths." So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road. Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities." For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation." Lloyd Wright Executive Director Viva Robles 653 y Av. Amazonas Oficinas 601-602-603 Quito Ecuador Tel. +593 2 255 1492 Mobile +593 9 577 6500 Fax +44 871 263 8779 Email lwright@vivacities.org Web www.vivacities.org "Viva...changing the world one street at a time." -------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via YAHOOGROUPS. Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). -------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT NOTE to everyone who gets sustran-discuss messages via YAHOOGROUPS. Please go to http://list.jca.apc.org/manage/listinfo/sustran-discuss to join the real sustran-discuss and get full membership rights. The yahoogroups version is only a mirror and 'members' there cannot post to the real sustran-discuss (even if the yahoogroups site makes it seem like you can). Apologies for the confusing arrangement. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). From siegeljd at earthlink.net Tue Sep 18 08:09:56 2007 From: siegeljd at earthlink.net (Joel Siegel) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:09:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [sustran] Re: [carfree_cities] Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation Message-ID: <382382.1190070597047.JavaMail.root@elwamui-huard.atl.sa.earthlink.net> The msnbc link above the article actually links to a story about Hillary Clinton's health care plan (otherwise known as the Health Insurance Company Profit Security Plan, but I digress). It's possible that MSNBC moved the link. Here's a link to the original article at Salon.com, which should remain stable: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/14/bike_paths/ Cheers, Joel Siegel -----Original Message----- >From: Lloyd Wright >Sent: Sep 17, 2007 2:39 PM >To: Carfree Cities , Sustran >Subject: [carfree_cities] Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation > > >Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the >bicycle to be a form of transporation... > > >http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827 > > >The bicycle thief > From rajendra_media at yahoo.com Thu Sep 20 02:13:13 2007 From: rajendra_media at yahoo.com (Rajendra A (Hindustan Times)) Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:13:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [sustran] Maharashtra to limit speed of vehilces to 65kmph In-Reply-To: <20070916030053.B92702E864@mx-list.jca.ne.jp> Message-ID: <517969.64864.qm@web61315.mail.yahoo.com> Maharashtra to limit speed of vehilces to 65kmph Rajendra Aklekar Mumbai, Sept 18 ALL commercial vehicles in Maharashtra would soon move at a pace of not more than 65kmph, thanks to a proposal sent by the state?s transport department to the government to enforce the rule of implementing ?speed governors? on all its vehicles. The commercial category of vehicles includes trucks, trailers, and even taxis and autos. The move is aimed at cutting down accidents and accidental deaths in Maharashtra, one among the top states in the country to have high death rate due to road accidents. Confirming the move, Maharashtra transport commissioner Shyamsunder D Shinde said, ?Yes. We have made a detailed proposal on it and sent it to the state government for an approval. Speed governor is a life-saving device and the basic aim of this is to curb the increasing number of accidents. By implementing this rule, you may reach late, but will be much more safer on the state?s roads.? ?The rule will be applicable to all commercial and public transport vehicles. We went on a visit to the south and have studied all the aspects of it. Installing the device will be mandatory on all old and new vehicles,? Shinde added. ?Every heavy vehicle comes for a periodical test at the local RTO offices and that is when such devices could be installed,? he added. Besides Delhi, which has made it mandatory to install speed governors on Blueline buses, Karnataka and Kerala are also in the process of making the device compulsory for transport vehicles. At the last count, Maharashtra has 2,14625 trailors, 6,76,120 public carriers, 1,41545 taxis, 5,51,181 autos and the latest available death figure is 11,000 deaths per year, which means 25 to 30 deaths per day on the state?s highways. Costing anywhere between Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 speed governor is a device that is linked to the gearbox where sensors capture the pulse movements. If the speed exceeds 65 kmph, device cuts it down technically. The device will be more helpful in hi-speed areas like the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and major highways where heavy vehicles tend to speed up. In Mumbai traffic, an average heavy vehicle seldom gets a chance to exceed beyond 65 kmph. Mohinder Singh Ghura, general secretary of Maharashtra Heavy Goods Vehicle Owners Association, ridiculed the move. ?Heavy vehicles all that cargo can never exceed 65 kmph and even otherwise heavy vehicles never speed up 60. This move will not be of any help and will be a new tool to simply harass us. I do not understand the need for such devices, especially when there is provision in the law to prosecute over-speeding. It is a move to make money ? first by way of commission from the device manufacturer and second by harassing innocent heavy vehicle drivers,? he alleged. Another transporter said then the basic purpose of building a smooth expressway would be defeated and the decision would also lead to huge economic loss and the movement of cargo and speed would be curtailed and move to other means like railways and airways. ?The RTO should give more focus on road design instead of this. The bad road designs along the highway are more responsible for the increasing number of accidents, not more speed? Prakash Gawli, president of Maharashtra Rajya Truck, Tempo, Tankers, Bus Vahatuk Mahasangh. Anthony L Quadros, general secretary of Mumbai Taximen?s Union also said that installation of the device will have no effect on Mumbai?s taxis. ?All cabs in Mumbai are run on CNG and have a difficult time gaining speed. It becomes difficult for an average Mumbai taxi to climb the Lower Parel flyover and even if we want, we cannot go beyond 45-50 kmph, so if this device is installed in our cabs, they will not move at all.? rajendra.aklekar@hindustantimes.com --- Rajendra Aklekar Principal Correspondent, Transport Hindustan Times, Mumbai HT Media Limited -- 140-4752, Nehru Nagar Mumbai, 400024 Mobile: +91 9892 190 761 Office: 66539200 Fax: 66539250/60 --- ____________________________________________________________________________________ Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story. Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games. http://sims.yahoo.com/ From eric.britton at free.fr Mon Sep 24 01:28:28 2007 From: eric.britton at free.fr (eric.britton at free.fr) Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:28:28 +0200 Subject: [sustran] World Citizen City Mobility Audit - Proposal and first stage brainstorm Message-ID: <5FBBB164F1734BDBB8A8FF368F787554@joey> Dear for the most part sustainable friends, spotted so widely around this heating-up planet, What if a number of us were to put our heads together in the weeks directly ahead and see what we can do to come up with a simple, quickly done, collaborative toolkit to take the temperature of transport and mobility, new and old, in a fair cross-section of cities in various places around the world.? May I suggest that we have a quick look at this idea? 1. Summary: KISS: The core idea is to ask, say, three powerful, basic, quickly answered questions to a sample of ten people selected on a semi-random basis in your city -- to see if in this way you can take the temperature of just how good a job (or other) your city and those responsible for it are doing as far as its mobility arrangements are concerned. The first cut proposal you find here is that each of the three questions should be laid out with three possible responses, in part (a) so that this can be done by you and your colleagues in a couple of hours and (b) so that the various city results can then be summed in some interesting ways to get a broader overall picture of what is going on in our cities around the world. If you think this could be made (with your help I would hope) into a good and useful resource, and in the hope that you all will find some use in the open collaboration that is the soul of our work under the New Mobility Agenda, I would be very pleased if you might agree to pitch in to make this work. Once you have made your way through the background materials and first-cut suggestions that follow, it would be good if you would take a few minutes to give me your response to the following three short questions in a return mail. 1. Do you consider that this idea of an open collaborative city survey project worth pursuing? 2. Would you be willing to pitch in and cover your city with at least the very short 10 x 3/3 questionnaire? 3. And if not for whatever reason, would you agree to pass this on to someone else in your city or elsewhere who you think might find this useful, and possibly even be willing to run the questionnaire and report back to our open group. Now on to my first cut proposal as to how this might be attacked and put to work. * Note: We propose that these discussions take place on the "Idea Factory" of the New Mobility Agenda. Again the website is at www.newmobility.org , and to post to the list: NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com 2. First thoughts on organization: An opening word on what I think this might become. First of all a free universal resource, with a broad range of possible uses Beyond this, it could be turned into a kind of "how are we doing" check-list in which your or my city could get a feel for how it stacks up. And perhaps some clues as to what could be done to do better in the future. It would be good to have a least one qualified investigator per city, and the goal would be to get a collection of ten reactions to the three questions. And it would be important that our collaborators have balanced views on our complex topic. So if you hate cars and drivers per se, or if you are an aggressive cyclist who consider that everyone out there should bend to your needs and preferences, etc. etc. perhaps you will do well to give this a miss. We need balance if this is to mean anything. As our friends over at the Wikipedia put it so well: NPD - Neutral Point of View. This is intended not to be a "back"-breaking PhD-like survey of surveys but something that our volunteer colleagues can take care of in a couple of well spent (and I am sure for them very interesting) hours. The important thing is that it be fair, non-political and good humored (though it may be hard for your respondents if they are stuck in traffic or being crushed in a sweltering rail car to be altogether smiling and easy about their answers - but that comes with the territory, eh?) Geographic/ coverage: The broader our coverage the more useful the final results. I would like to see cities on all continents and at various income levels. City sizes: From mega-cities to small towns. Quick Identifying information on city: Collaborators in each case would provide a short list of identifies covering these key defining points, which will then be useful as various of us go to work to parse the results and see what this all means. Collaborator notes on the details of the process and commentaries will also be most useful. (And they need not be long.) Future updates: which perhaps someone with the resources and know-how might even wish to undertake to maintain. Certainly, it would be interesting and I think useful if we were to have the results of these simple surveys in our cities over some years. At least over the critical 2007-2012 period that now lies ahead of us. Web version: Might also be an idea to have this on the web in some form. So that others can come in and give us either (a) their personal views about the present state of play in their cities on these 3/3 questions or perhaps also (b) provide answers to the larger questionnaire (if one is created). Obviously we will need clear identifying information on anyone signing in on this. 3. The Questionnaire (proposal for comments): I propose we ask only three questions, each of which offering three response options . This is the on-the run version, and indeed the one that I think needs to be in the middle of this collaborative effort. The exact wording??? 1. Is your city presently delivering high quality transport services for you and your family in your daily lives? * No, not really (Further comment and levels of satisfaction/otherwise can be placed in the annexed comments section that all will be invited to speak to in crisp language.) * Some good things yes, but still a huge amount to do in order to pull the whole thing together * By and large, yes they are doing a good job - and it seems to me that they have a game plan to continue to improve and expand 2. What are the 3 best things that your city team has already achieved to date (or are seriously working on)? 1. ______________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________ 3. What are the 3 biggest "black holes" of mobility for all in our city? 1. ______________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________ What kind of clues might we offer them for answering these questions? And here I have to ask for your counsel: * On the one hand, we want to hear what they have to say and certainly not put words into their moths. * But then if this exercise is to find its full usefulness, we need a format for the responses that can be tabulated in a straight forward way so that we can at the same time get a broader picture, both of, say, how we here in our city stack up with the rest - but also how things look if we parse the responses according to certain key groups (M/F, age, economic status, car owners, etc.) Note: I propose that we also see if we can think through and possibly develop a uniform and somewhat longer questionnaire (perhaps ten questions, with more room for their short comments and suggestions. Bearing in mind that at the end of the day what we are aiming for is a clear view of not only how people look at transport and governance in our city, and then in the entire sample. 4. Sample Organization: The proposal is for you to walk out onto the street of your city one morning in the next weeks and talk in a structured manner to a small sample people on the street, some in cars (getting in or out probably best), on or waiting for a bus, walking, cycling, or perhaps selling something on the street. Maybe one street person?. It would be great of course if our sample could include a couple of people who are for one reason or another not able to use the city's mobility systems easily, but I can't this morning figure out how to bring them into the sample. One idea would be to seek out someone in a wheel chair and ask them our three questions. My first thought is that ten will be just fine as a semi-random sample in each city. More and it starts to take a lot of your time, and I feel that if we get our questionnaire and sample technique right, this will just be fine to do the job. Obviously half the respondents should be women, at least half people who own or at least make use of a car (and lots who don't), a fair age split, something on economic status (maybe, job, student, unemployed, retired . . .) and what else might you suggest . . .? * * * That's about the best I can do to get the ball rolling on this. I look forward with real interest to hearing from your views and suggestions. Also, if anyone wishes to take this over and run with it, be my guest. But I do want to make it simple and fast. We have already lost enough time in reinventing transport in our cities. Eric Britton From eric.britton at free.fr Mon Sep 24 01:33:17 2007 From: eric.britton at free.fr (eric.britton at free.fr) Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:33:17 +0200 Subject: [sustran] World Citizen City Mobility Audit - Proposal and first stage brainstorm Message-ID: Dear for the most part sustainable friends, spotted so widely around this heating-up planet, What if a number of us were to put our heads together in the weeks directly ahead and see what we can do to come up with a simple, quickly done, collaborative toolkit to take the temperature of transport and mobility, new and old, in a fair cross-section of cities in various places around the world.? May I suggest that we have a quick look at this idea? 1. Summary: KISS: The core idea is to ask, say, three powerful, basic, quickly answered questions to a sample of ten people selected on a semi-random basis in your city -- to see if in this way you can take the temperature of just how good a job (or other) your city and those responsible for it are doing as far as its mobility arrangements are concerned. The first cut proposal you find here is that each of the three questions should be laid out with three possible responses, in part (a) so that this can be done by you and your colleagues in a couple of hours and (b) so that the various city results can then be summed in some interesting ways to get a broader overall picture of what is going on in our cities around the world. If you think this could be made (with your help I would hope) into a good and useful resource, and in the hope that you all will find some use in the open collaboration that is the soul of our work under the New Mobility Agenda, I would be very pleased if you might agree to pitch in to make this work. Once you have made your way through the background materials and first-cut suggestions that follow, it would be good if you would take a few minutes to give me your response to the following three short questions in a return mail. 1. Do you consider that this idea of an open collaborative city survey project worth pursuing? 2. Would you be willing to pitch in and cover your city with at least the very short 10 x 3/3 questionnaire? 3. And if not for whatever reason, would you agree to pass this on to someone else in your city or elsewhere who you think might find this useful, and possibly even be willing to run the questionnaire and report back to our open group. Now on to my first cut proposal as to how this might be attacked and put to work. * Note: We propose that these discussions take place on the "Idea Factory" of the New Mobility Agenda. Again the website is at www.newmobility.org , and to post to the list: NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com 2. First thoughts on organization: An opening word on what I think this might become. First of all a free universal resource, with a broad range of possible uses Beyond this, it could be turned into a kind of "how are we doing" check-list in which your or my city could get a feel for how it stacks up. And perhaps some clues as to what could be done to do better in the future. It would be good to have a least one qualified investigator per city, and the goal would be to get a collection of ten reactions to the three questions. And it would be important that our collaborators have balanced views on our complex topic. So if you hate cars and drivers per se, or if you are an aggressive cyclist who consider that everyone out there should bend to your needs and preferences, etc. etc. perhaps you will do well to give this a miss. We need balance if this is to mean anything. As our friends over at the Wikipedia put it so well: NPD - Neutral Point of View. This is intended not to be a "back"-breaking PhD-like survey of surveys but something that our volunteer colleagues can take care of in a couple of well spent (and I am sure for them very interesting) hours. The important thing is that it be fair, non-political and good humored (though it may be hard for your respondents if they are stuck in traffic or being crushed in a sweltering rail car to be altogether smiling and easy about their answers - but that comes with the territory, eh?) Geographic/ coverage: The broader our coverage the more useful the final results. I would like to see cities on all continents and at various income levels. City sizes: From mega-cities to small towns. Quick Identifying information on city: Collaborators in each case would provide a short list of identifies covering these key defining points, which will then be useful as various of us go to work to parse the results and see what this all means. Collaborator notes on the details of the process and commentaries will also be most useful. (And they need not be long.) Future updates: which perhaps someone with the resources and know-how might even wish to undertake to maintain. Certainly, it would be interesting and I think useful if we were to have the results of these simple surveys in our cities over some years. At least over the critical 2007-2012 period that now lies ahead of us. Web version: Might also be an idea to have this on the web in some form. So that others can come in and give us either (a) their personal views about the present state of play in their cities on these 3/3 questions or perhaps also (b) provide answers to the larger questionnaire (if one is created). Obviously we will need clear identifying information on anyone signing in on this. 3. The Questionnaire (proposal for comments): I propose we ask only three questions, each of which offering three response options . This is the on-the run version, and indeed the one that I think needs to be in the middle of this collaborative effort. The exact wording??? 1. Is your city presently delivering high quality transport services for you and your family in your daily lives? * No, not really (Further comment and levels of satisfaction/otherwise can be placed in the annexed comments section that all will be invited to speak to in crisp language.) * Some good things yes, but still a huge amount to do in order to pull the whole thing together * By and large, yes they are doing a good job - and it seems to me that they have a game plan to continue to improve and expand 2. What are the 3 best things that your city team has already achieved to date (or are seriously working on)? 1. ______________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________ 3. What are the 3 biggest "black holes" of mobility for all in our city? 1. ______________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________ What kind of clues might we offer them for answering these questions? And here I have to ask for your counsel: * On the one hand, we want to hear what they have to say and certainly not put words into their moths. * But then if this exercise is to find its full usefulness, we need a format for the responses that can be tabulated in a straight forward way so that we can at the same time get a broader picture, both of, say, how we here in our city stack up with the rest - but also how things look if we parse the responses according to certain key groups (M/F, age, economic status, car owners, etc.) Note: I propose that we also see if we can think through and possibly develop a uniform and somewhat longer questionnaire (perhaps ten questions, with more room for their short comments and suggestions. Bearing in mind that at the end of the day what we are aiming for is a clear view of not only how people look at transport and governance in our city, and then in the entire sample. 4. Sample Organization: The proposal is for you to walk out onto the street of your city one morning in the next weeks and talk in a structured manner to a small sample people on the street, some in cars (getting in or out probably best), on or waiting for a bus, walking, cycling, or perhaps selling something on the street. Maybe one street person?. It would be great of course if our sample could include a couple of people who are for one reason or another not able to use the city's mobility systems easily, but I can't this morning figure out how to bring them into the sample. One idea would be to seek out someone in a wheel chair and ask them our three questions. My first thought is that ten will be just fine as a semi-random sample in each city. More and it starts to take a lot of your time, and I feel that if we get our questionnaire and sample technique right, this will just be fine to do the job. Obviously half the respondents should be women, at least half people who own or at least make use of a car (and lots who don't), a fair age split, something on economic status (maybe, job, student, unemployed, retired . . .) and what else might you suggest . . .? * * * That's about the best I can do to get the ball rolling on this. I look forward with real interest to hearing from your views and suggestions. Also, if anyone wishes to take this over and run with it, be my guest. But I do want to make it simple and fast. We have already lost enough time in reinventing transport in our cities. Eric Britton From edelman at greenidea.info Mon Sep 24 19:14:44 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:14:44 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Carfree Menu for Sustainability: Beijing / Park(ing) / London / Prague Message-ID: <46F78E14.9020806@greenidea.info> First, the bitter appetizer: The BBC's James Reynolds in Beijing says that cars are coming and going as normal, and most streets in Beijing are not adhering to No Car Day. *** Next, the savoury main course (already introduced by Markus Heller earlier in the week to people on WCN list): Conceived by REBAR, a San Francisco-based art collective, PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event centred in San Francisco where artists, activists and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into "PARK(ing)" spaces: temporary public parks. main page: here are some participant-generated Flickr pages about what happened on Friday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfbike/sets/72157602112627733/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/parkingday/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/72157602107303944/ >From WCN member Time's Up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/txup/sets/72157602110941213/ **** Dessert: Cyclists enjoy car ban in London Traffic has been banned from several roads in central London for the day to make way for thousands of cyclists taking part in a mass bike ride. More than 30,000 people will ride along a 14km (8.7 mile) car-free route past iconic landmarks in the city. **** Extra helping of dessert: Finally, the Prague Critical Mass "Big Autumn Ride" reportedly had about 1500 participants (including lots of children), plus five dogs, the biggest ever! - T ****** -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net From voodikon at yahoo.com Mon Sep 24 21:47:46 2007 From: voodikon at yahoo.com (Jennifer Ashley) Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 05:47:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [sustran] Re: [carfree_network] Carfree Menu for Sustainability: Beijing / Park(ing) / London / Prague In-Reply-To: <46F78E14.9020806@greenidea.info> Message-ID: <504360.41018.qm@web39515.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I can attest to the apparent lack of adherence to No Car Day in Chengdu, which Shanghai-based Bloomberg.com reporter Irena Shen confirmed to me, was supposed to be one of the 108 Chinese cities participating. I had a bike ride down a main road on the afternoon of the 22nd and observed no noticeable decrease in traffic; when I looked out the office window at a quarter past 6 in the evening, the streets were clogged as usual with vehicles of every sort. What the hell is that, I wonder. Why tout it if nobody's going to do it? "Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory" wrote: First, the bitter appetizer: The BBC's James Reynolds in Beijing says that cars are coming and going as normal, and most streets in Beijing are not adhering to No Car Day. *** Next, the savoury main course (already introduced by Markus Heller earlier in the week to people on WCN list): Conceived by REBAR, a San Francisco-based art collective, PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event centred in San Francisco where artists, activists and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into "PARK(ing)" spaces: temporary public parks. main page: here are some participant-generated Flickr pages about what happened on Friday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfbike/sets/72157602112627733/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/parkingday/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/72157602107303944/ >From WCN member Time's Up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/txup/sets/72157602110941213/ **** Dessert: Cyclists enjoy car ban in London Traffic has been banned from several roads in central London for the day to make way for thousands of cyclists taking part in a mass bike ride. More than 30,000 people will ride along a 14km (8.7 mile) car-free route past iconic landmarks in the city. **** Extra helping of dessert: Finally, the Prague Critical Mass "Big Autumn Ride" reportedly had about 1500 participants (including lots of children), plus five dogs, the biggest ever! - T ****** -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net [carfree_network] list guidelines and unsubscribe information are found at http://www.worldcarfree.net/listservs/. Send messages for the entire list to carfree_network@lists.riseup.net. Send replies to individuals off-list. --------------------------------- Boardwalk for $500? In 2007? Ha! Play Monopoly Here and Now (it's updated for today's economy) at Yahoo! Games. From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Tue Sep 25 00:09:37 2007 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (eric.britton) Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:09:37 +0200 Subject: [sustran] World Citizen City Mobility Audit - Memo 2 on methodology In-Reply-To: <46F74BB4.5070508@sfu.ca> Message-ID: <3BDA25A36BAA4C73A620932CA0ED3BDF@joey> [This collaborative project-in-process is being discussed in the "Idea Factory" of the New Mobility Agenda. Again the website is http://www.newmobility.org/, and to post your contribution: NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com.This second note from here on this proposal is intended to generate your comments and suggestions] This thinking exercise today is in three parts. First (A) we offer you a first draft of the short introductory statement that the interviewer will wish to make to orient the interviewee. Then (B) we move on to some thoughts about how we should best identify the respondents. And finally (C) we look a bit closer at the Three Questions which are at the core of this mini-inquiry. The following follows on from yesterday's introductory note on proposed open collaborative project. A. Introductory remarks: Some possible wording to help you frame your introduction to the people you approach (again draft for your improvement): * Hi. We are carrying out an informal survey here in which we are tying to find out what a cross-section of citizens here think about our city's transportation arrangements. A kind of "how are we doing"? survey aimed at hearing from men and women, people of different ages and physical condition, different economic groups, etc. * We realize that no city is perfect, but we also know that some cities are doing better than others. And our goal here is to see if we can see how our deity stacks up with others. * I should mention that we are trying to get a balanced, neutral assessment, which is why we are trying to talk to different kinds of people with different situations and we can be sure different opinions about how the city is doing. * Our hope is that this will get the attention of policy makers both here in the city and in higher levels of government, and the media and various citizen groups, to see if we can help them focus their minds on problems and eventual solutions. * Thanks for agreeing to take ten minutes to share your thoughts with us on this, and before we turn to the questions I'd like to ask you a couple of questions that will help us to understand where you and the others we are talking to are coming from on all this. B. Identifying respondents by key categories: Here are ten things that I propose it would be useful to know about each of those who agree to respond to our quick 10x3/3 on street survey. Note: The goal of the entire process, the questions and this identification information (which is needed for the analysis) is to wrap it up within ten minutes for each interview. (The first two items can be jotted down by the interviewer as best guesses.) 1. Sex: M/F 2. Age Group: (rough is just fine) * 25. * 25-50/60. * Over 50/60. 3. Economic Status: * Employed. * Unemployed. * Student. * Retired. * Other (?) 4. City geography: * Live central area and main activity there * Live in suburbs, activity in center city (downtown) * Live in center, active in suburbs * Live, active in suburbs * Just visiting (?) 5. Do you own a car? Yes/No 6. Do you drive to you main activity most days? * Drive mainly lone * Share car on regular basis 7. Do you use public transport in/to city: * Never * Rarely * Occasionally * Often 8. Name and email. For our internal use only. Email used to mail them our results. If they prefer anonymity, that's just fine. C. The Three questions in the 10x3/3 Quick Survey: 1. How good would you say is the transport system of our city? 0 = Awful. The pits. It sucks 1 = Bad. Painful. Disappointing 2 = Weak. Not nearly good enough. 3. = Tolerable. But needs work 4. = Pretty good. Seem to be moving in the right direction 5. = Terrific. World level. Strong example for other cities. 2. Bright spots: What are the 3 best and brightest things that our city team has already achieved in recent years (or are seriously working on)? 1. ______________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________ 3. Black holes: What are the 3 most appalling trouble spots of mobility for all in our city? 1. ______________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________ Some thoughts on the kind of clues might we offer them for answering these two questions? Positives that we might suggest they bear in mind (but not to eliminate or try to precondition their own free choices of course): Our system is . .. * Pretty safe * Lots of choices * Healthy * Reliable (trip times) * Economic: pretty good deal * Contributes to clean air * Generally works well * Getting better And some of the negatives that might want to have at the back of their minds when the respond to the third and final question. Our present transportation arrangements in the city are . . . * Dangerous * Offer no choice really (only one genuine option) * Unhealthy * Expensive * Highly polluting * Getting worse every year * System's broke * And nobody appears to be really willing to try to fix it. * * * And a final quick question to you in closing. How much would we have to pay you - if anything - for you to get out on the street and run your own 10x3/3 survey in your city? \ Thanks for letting me know if this might be of any interest to you at all. Eric Britton From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Tue Sep 25 00:20:01 2007 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (eric.britton) Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:20:01 +0200 Subject: [sustran] The Best Things in Life are Free - So Why Not Public Transit in NYC? Message-ID: This article appears in the Summer 2007 Transportation Alternatives Magazine. Thanks George and thanks TransAlt for sharing this with us. We tend to think that there are a number of strong arguments for free public transport - or at the very least giving it a close look in all cities. It's not as whacky as you may at first think. But of course you have to be willing to give unfamiliar ideas a break. Not least because most of the familiar ones are showing their age badly. What was it that exchange involving Lord Keynes said on changing his mind: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?". Eric Britton (For more go the www.transalt.org .) Provocateur The Best Things in Life are Free So Why Not Public Transit in NYC? by George Haikalis "If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars." -Mayor Michael Bloomberg, April 2007 For many years transit advocates have called for affordable public transit fares. The MTA took a big step in that direction beginning ten years ago, when it introduced unlimited ride passes and free transfers between buses and subways. Ridership soared because of these pricing innovations. Price really does matter - it strongly affects travel behavior, whether on transit or in cars. Mayor Bloomberg's plan for congestion pricing to reduce car use in the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) is a critical step in improving the walking and cycling environment in the crowded core of our city, but to be fully successful it must be accompanied by a strategy to lower the price for transit use. Just how low can it go? Well, all the way to zero is a possibility. Thanks to a generous grant from Nurturing New York's Nature, a foundation headed by NYC's storied labor negotiator, Theodore Kheel, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, Inc. (IRUM) has initiated a study of free or reduced fare transit combined with Manhattan CBD Cordon Tolls. Cordon pricing has been very successful in Central London, where traffic volumes have been decreased by 17% and congestion has been reduced by 30%. Preliminary findings of the "Price Matters" study suggest that if Manhattan CBD Cordon Tolls were set at the current London level -- $16 per entry -- and were applied at all times of the day, weekdays and weekends, some $3.113 billion in revenues would be generated, fully offsetting MTA bus and subway revenues, and leaving a $283 million per year surplus. Added to this would be savings resulting from not collecting fares on the subway, some $360 million per year. Further cost savings occur by eliminating fare collection on buses, which reduces boarding time and improves productivity. These gains would be offset by the added cost of operating more bus and rail service to accommodate increased ridership. The news media focuses its discussion on one facet of congestion pricing -- reducing the number of vehicles that interfere with each other at busy times and speeding up the remaining vehicles in the traffic stream. But even more important than making life easier for motorists is the gain for the two million residents, visitors and workers who each day must deal with the painful negatives that result from too many motor vehicles in the CBD. And many of these ills persist after rush hours - noise and air pollution, and injuries and deaths resulting from motor vehicular traffic occur at all hours of the day and night. For free transit to work, it is clear that transit capacity must be quickly expanded to accommodate the diverted motorists and new riders generated by congestion pricing and free public transit. Fortunately, the subway and commuter rail system have the track capacity to handle much higher loads. In the morning peak hour, where ridership is greatest, only 51.5% of the capacity on the twenty inbound rail tracks leading to the CBD is utilized. For most lines, overcrowding is the result of management decisions to contain operating cost, not because of system limitations. More trains could be placed into service over the next several years if the 1,500 subway and commuter rail cars now slated for retirement were kept in service, as new cars now being manufactured arrive. Operating cost would increase, but only modestly since the bulk of cost is to maintain the fixed plant, including tracks, signals and stations. Several subway lines, including the Lexington and Queens Boulevard express lines, are operating at track capacity, and our study will assess the ability of commuter rail lines serving the Bronx and Queens to draw overloads from these subways lines. A few years ago, congestion pricing in NYC existed only as a fantasy. Things change. We're finally in the midst a long overdo debate on the transportation system our city deserves. Let's make free transit part of that vision. Preliminary results of the Price Matters study are posted at www.irum.org . George Haikalis is President of the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility. [IMAGE: TK] [CAPTION: The Staten Island Ferry is already free. An ongoing study proposed free buses and subways.] From anupam9gupta at gmail.com Tue Sep 25 13:59:55 2007 From: anupam9gupta at gmail.com (Anupam Gupta) Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:29:55 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Re: Sustran-discuss Digest, Vol 49, Issue 14 In-Reply-To: <20070925030118.B94472D4D5@mx-list.jca.ne.jp> References: <20070925030118.B94472D4D5@mx-list.jca.ne.jp> Message-ID: <000501c7ff30$eef7f890$cce7e9b0$@com> Hi Eric - Just wanted to know how do I give credit to something I picked up from here? For e.g., I was planning to briefly post that article you posted here on free public transit. I thought of.. 1. "Incoming link from Eric Britton at the Sustran discussion group" 2. "Incoming link from the Sustran discussion group" Which one would be more preferable for this article as well as for anything in the future? Thanks Anupam http://www.bombayaddict.com From edelman at greenidea.info Fri Sep 28 07:36:40 2007 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory) Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:36:40 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Re: [sfbike] share the road WITH LINK In-Reply-To: <20070927150505.d1d1e412ed2f7a2b19adc33ac8ddc065.1b83c3146d.wbe@email.secureserver.net> References: <20070927150505.d1d1e412ed2f7a2b19adc33ac8ddc065.1b83c3146d.wbe@email.secureserver.net> Message-ID: <46FC3078.4010804@greenidea.info> Ultimate roadsharing... -- -------------------------------------------- Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Korunn? 72 CZ-10100 Praha 10 Czech Republic Skype: toddedelman ++420 605 915 970 ++420 222 517 832 edelman@greenidea.eu http://greenideafactory.blogspot.com/ www.flickr.com/photos/edelman Green Idea Factory is a member of World Carfree Network www.worldcarfree.net From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Fri Sep 28 19:34:04 2007 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Administrative User) Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:34:04 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Become a Green Driver and love it (Ac-centuate the Positive ) Message-ID: <053d01c801bb$1a856100$4f902300$@britton@ecoplan.org> Unlike most of you, I have to admit that I have never had an original idea in my life. Most of what I come up with is usually either borrowed, more or less innocently purloined , or has already been put forward on numerous occasions without my knowing it by hundreds of other people and places that have had that idea or better many years ago. Yet, dear friends, I persist. Today?s ?latest new and great idea from Paris? that I would like to put before you has to do with a proposal for what I suggest we call Green Driving (or would ?Green Cars?[1] perhaps be better?) My idea this morning is to share this in its present early form, in the hope that some of you will chime in and help us make it into a better and more effective package. Or better yet, put it to work in your city. >From a strategic perceptive the idea is to see if we can find a way to roll a number of needed measures, reforms and actions into a single coherent package, which is not only good for the environment and for our cities and all those who live and work there, but also is something that has a positive ring to it so that people will welcome it as a great thing to do. Rather than scrape, gripe, grumble and at the end of the day resist. Which is almost always the case given the prevalent policy mind set of the day. What are our goals behind Green Driving? You've got to ac-centuate the positive E-liminate the negative L-atch on to the affirmative And don't mess with Mister In-Between -- Lyrics by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, circa 1944 As the song goes, Green Driving accentuates the positive, and works or could work something like this. The idea behind it is that if you are a Green Driver, you have a better, more comfortable and more economic life style. (And oh yes, you are also cool and have more friends!) Yes, the city changes because it must before the increasingly urgent climate challenge, but also for many other immediate local reasons -- however at the same time as a Green Driver you now have at your disposal a whole rich panoply of technologies and organizational devices which permit you to be palpably better off than you were under the old mobility arrangements which our cities are increasingly leaving behind it. You are, for sure, a car owner/driver, but as a Green Driver you are not stuck in traffic, you are not spending a bundle, and what is more, in addition to your own much loved car, now a lot more effective than it was in the old days, you also now have access to a whole range of the new and improved mobility options which you can use as and when you wish to. (Look Ma, no compulsion!) Now while this simple, single, understandable positive proposal encompasses goals usually seen as ?negative? ? traffic reduction, fewer cars on the road, less congestion, lower speeds, fewer places to park, less energy consumed, greenhouse gas reductions, resource savings, and the long list goes on ? we can, I am confident, achieve these important objectives, but this time with Green Driving putting the whole thing in a positive frame. This is not to say that this approach will succeed in keeping everyone from screaming, you will always have the screamers (as Enrique Pe?alosa put it so well) , but it will not only keep that number down considerably. Also, it is positive and at the same time can be shown to lead to numerous other advantages, including offering improved transportation options and services to many people who simply would not have them if you had not put ?green driving? into practice in your city. How does it work? Now what exactly does green driving consist of? An extensive package of integrated, synergistic policies, measures and technologies and while this is not the place for me to roll out the full big carpet, here in shorthand is a first quick list of some of the good things that can be folded into such a program: 1. New ?Zip Right In? parking technologies and packages which permit you to reserve your parking slot by mobile phone or internet before you set off on your trip, so that you can zip straight into your reserved slot without driving all over the place to find one; 2. A twenty first century fillip for ride-sharing (car and van pools) which is known as ?digital hitchhiking; 3. Privileged access to HOV lanes and conveniences; 4. Proportional and significant parking reductions as an HOV 5. Carsharing; 6. ?Shed a car? (Vehicle Buy Back) incentive programs and packages; 7. Driver training programs for new mixed-mode travel patterns to reduce accidents 8. Free and high quality training programs for eco-driving Of course it?s a package and different cities will handle it indifferent ways. And there?s a lot more that can be folded into such a package, but you get the idea! And I hope you will share your ideas about how to fill out this list All this in combination with high profile projects such as the Paris Free Bikes which everyone sees as positive and which even as we do them not only offer options to car travel, but also and far more subtly work on people?s minds and attitudes (which at the end of the day what this is supposed to be all about). Now it?s your turn. Please send your comments and suggestions to the New Mobility Agenda ?idea factory, addressing your mail to NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com. I also invite you to share this note with other people and lists who you think might find it useful or better yet wish to join in to make it better. _____ [1] IF you call up ?Green Cars? in Google you will see more than seven hundred thousand entries. I checked out the firs hundred or so, and none, none was even close to what we are talking about here. Still, I wound not mind if we stole their name, and stole their thunder. I like our Green Cars a lot more.