[sustran] [World Streets] Welcome to World Streets

[Eric Britton (Paris, France)]

[http://www.strategy.newmobility.org]
Eric Britton, Editor, World Streets, Paris, France

World Streets is not exactly what you would call a neutral source. We
have a very definite view concerning transportation policy and
planning, which has itself come out of long experience with working
with and observing transport in and around cities in many parts of the
world. It would not be true to say that these views are unique for to
us; indeed they have been distilled over the years as result of our
conversations, contacts, in collaboration with farsighted colleagues
and policymakers in many places.

It is only appropriate that I clearly state the underlying philosophy
of this new sustainability journal in no uncertain terms here at the
outset.

The New Mobility Agenda in brief

The main reference point for all that you will read and commented on in
these pages is the long-term program, the New Mobility Agenda, an
international collaborative program focusing entirely on transportation
in and around cities which has been in operation since 1988 with
continuous interactive presence on the Internet as one of the pillars
of the collaborative knowledge building process that is behind it. And
this is what we have concluded:

Virtually all of the necessary preconditions are now in place for
far-reaching, rapid, low cost improvements in the ways that people get
around in our cites. The needs are there, they are increasingly
understood -- and we now know what to do and how to get the job done.
The challenge is to find the vision, political will, and leadership to
get the job done, step by deliberate step:

But we have to have a coherent, ethical, publicly announced, checkable,
overarching strategy. Without it we are destined to play at the edges
of the problems, and while we may be able to announce a success or
improvement here or there, the overall impact that your city needs to
break the old patterns will not be there. We really need that clear,
consistent, omnipresent strategy.

The Agenda provides a free public platform for new thinking and open
collaborative group problem solving, bringing together more than a
thousand leading thinkers and actors in the field from more than fifty
counties world-wide, sharing information and considering together the
full range of problems and eventual solution paths that constitute the
global challenge of sustainable transport in cities.

What is wrong with "Old Mobility"

We make a consistent distinction between what we call "old mobility"
and "new mobility". The difference between the two is quite simple. And
substantial.

Old mobility was the form of transportation policy, practice and
thinking that took shape starting in the mid twentieth century, at a
time when we all lived in a universe that was, or at least seemed to
be, free of constraints. It served us well, albeit with expectations,
though we were blind to most of them most of the time. It was a very
different world. But that world is over. And it will never come back.

The planet was enormous, the spaces great and open, energy abundant and
cheap, resources endless, the "environment" was not a
consideration, "climate" was the weather, technology was able to come
up with a constant stream of solutions, builders able to solve the
problems that arose from bottlenecks by endlessly expanding capacity at
the trouble points, and fast growth and the thrill of continuing
innovations masked much of what was not all that good.

But this is not the reality of transport in the 21st century, and above
all in our cities which are increasingly poorly served by not only our
present mobility arrangements, but also the thinking and values that
underlie them. Our rural areas are likewise suffering and without a
coherent game plan. We now live in an entirely different kind of
universe, and the constraints which were never felt before, or ignored,
are now emerging as the fundamental building blocks for transportation
policy and practice in this new century.

It's time for a change. And the change has to start with us. You see,
we are the problem. But we can also be the solution.

And it must be understood that the shift from old to new mobility is
not one that turns its back on the importance of high quality mobility
for the economy and for quality of life. It's just that given the
technologies that we now have at our fingertips, and in the labs, it is
possible for us to redraw our transportation systems so that there is
less inefficient movement (the idea of one person sitting in traffic in
a big car with the engine idling is one example, an empty bus another)
and more high efficiency high quality transportation that offers many
more mobility choices than in the past, including the one that
environmentalist and many others find most appealing: getting what you
want without having to venture out into traffic at all. Now that's an
interesting new mobility strategy too.

What makes Worldstreets and the New Mobility Agenda tick?

Here you have in twelve short summaries the high points of the basic
strategic policy frame that we and our colleagues around the world have
pieced together over the years of work, observation and close contact
with projects and programs in leading cities around the world under the
New Mobility Agenda. (And if you click here you can see in a short
video (4 minute draft) a synopsis of the basic five-point core strategy
that the city of Paris has announced and adhered to over the last seven
years. With significant results.)

1. Climate-driven: The on-going climate emergency sets the base
timetable for action in our sector, which accounts for some 20% of
GHGs. At the same time GHG reduction works as a strong surrogate for
just about everything else to which we need to be giving priority
attention in our cities, chief among them the need to cut traffic.
Fewer vehicles on the road means less energy consumption, less
pollution in all forms, fewer accidents, reduced bills for
infrastructure construction and maintenance, quieter and safer cities,
and the long list goes on And what is so very interesting about the
mobility sector is that there is really a great deal we can do in a
relatively little time. And at relatively low cost. Beyond this, there
is an important joker which also needs to be brought into the picture
from the very beginning, and that is that these reductions can be
achieved not only without harming the economy or by quality for the
vast majority of all people, but even as part of an economic revival
which places increased emphasis on services and not products.

2. Tighten time frame for action: Select and gear all actions to
achieve visible results within 2-5 year time frame. Spend at least 50%,
preferably 80% of all your transportation budget on measure and
projects that are going to yield results within this time frame. Set
firm targets for all to see and judge the results. No-excuse transport
policy.

3. Reduce traffic radically. The critical, incontrovertible policy core
of the Agenda - BIG percentage cuts in VMT. If we don't achieve this,
we will have a situation where all the key indicators will continue to
move in the wrong direction. But we can cut traffic and at the same
time improve mobility. And the economy. That's our strategy.

4. Extend the range and quality of new mobility services available to
all: A whole range of exciting and practical new service modes are
needed if we are to keep our cities viable. And they need to COMBINE to
offer better, faster and cheaper mobility than the old car-intensive
arrangements or deficit-financed, heavy, old-technology, traditional
public transit. We need to open up our minds on this last score and
understand that what is more important than being stuck in the past
with the 19th century version of how "common people" best get about,
and move over to a new paradigm of a great variety of ways of providing
shared transport mediated in good part by 21st-century information
communications technologies

5. Design for women: Our old mobility system was designed by and
ultimately for a certain type of person (think about it). And so too
should the new mobility system: but this time around it should be
designed to accommodate specifically women, of all ages and conditions.
Do that and we will serve everybody far better. And for that to happen
we need to have a major leadership shift toward women, and as part of
that to move toward full gender parity in all bodies involved in the
decision process. It's that simple.

6. Packages of Measures: As distinguished from the old ways of planning
and making investments what is required in most places today are
carefully interlinked "packages" of numerous small as well as larger
projects and initiatives. Involving many more actors and participants.
One of the challenges of an effective new mobility policy will be to
find ways to see these various measures as interactive synergistic and
mutually supporting projects within a unified greater whole. A
significant challenge to our planners at all levels

7. The shifting role of the car: State-of-the-art technology can be put
to work hand-in-hand with the changing role of the private car in the
city in order to create situations in which even car use can be
integrated into the overall mobility strategy with a far softer edge.
These advantages need to be widely broadcast so as to increase
acceptance of the new pattern of urban mobility. The new mobility
environment must also be able to accommodate people in cars, since that
is an incontrovertible reality which will not go away simply because it
would seem like an ideal solution. We are going to have plenty of small
and medium-sized four-wheel, rubber tired, driver operated running
around on the streets of our cities and the surrounding regions, so the
challenge of planners and policymakers is to ensure that this occurs in
a way which is increasingly harmonious to the broader social, economic,
environmental objectives set out here.

8. Full speed ahead with new technology: New mobility is at its core
heavily driven by the aggressive application of state of the art
logistics, communications and information technology across the full
spectrum of service types. The transport system of the future is above
all an interactive information system, with the wheels and the feet at
the end of this chain. These are the seven leagues boots of new mobility

9. Play the "infrastructure joker": The transport infrastructures of
our cities have been vastly overbuilt. And they are unable to deliver
the goods. That's just great, since it means that we can now take over
substantial portions of the street network for far more efficient modes.

10. Frugal economics: We are not going to need another round of high
cost, low impact investments to make it work. We simply take over 50%
of the transport related budgets and use it to address to projects and
reforms that are going to make those big differences in the next
several years.

11. Partnerships: This approach, because it is new and unfamiliar to
most people, is unlike to be understood the first times around. Hence a
major education, consultation and outreach effort is needed in each
place to make it work. Old mobility was the terrain in which decisions
were made by transport experts working within their assigned zones of
competence. New mobility is based on wide-based collaborative problem
solving, outreach and harnessing the great strengths of the informed
and educated populations of our cities. Public/private/citizen
partnerships.

12. Pick winners: New approaches demand success. There is no margin of
error. So chose policies and services with track records of success and
build on their experience.


To move ahead in time to save the planet and improve life quality of
the majority of the people who live in our cities (no, they are not all
happy car owner-drivers: get out there and count them. You'll see.), we
need to have a fair, unified, coherent, and memorable strategy.

This is the challenge to which World Streets and the New Mobility
Agenda are addressed.

--
Posted By Eric Britton (Paris, France) to World Streets at 4/06/2009
10:39:00 AM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20090406/8bdccecb/attachment.html