[sustran] Re: Transport governance is also one such area which isnotwell-researched.

[Chris Bradshaw]

I have been reading the works of Elinor Ostrom, this year's winner of the 
Nobel Prize for Economics.  Ironically, she is a political scientist.  But 
her ideas may help here.

She studies CPRs, or Common Pool Resources, all in the natural domain: 
oceans, fish stocks, forests, rivers/streams.  Her point is that localized 
goverance institutions do a better job than formal 
state/national/international ones removed from the interplay of the parties 
sharing the resources.  Her writing, and that of a growing community of 
academics, touches on game theory, social-capital writings, economics 
(informal economies), and anthropology.

But she doesn't look at 'modern' sharing, except for the 'knowledge commons' 
(publishing and the internet).

But transportation -- and the continuous public right-of-way system that 
front on all properties -- is a shared space for human activity (along with 
a fair amount of activity of other species, e.g., road kill).  The growth in 
demand for automobiles and the two-wheeled motorized units represent a 
break-down in the sharing of this most important spacial system.  That these 
units are privately owned, vs. a pool of vehicles that are accessed only 
when needed (carsharing, bike-sharing, and even the new Peugeot "mu" system, 
just announced) makes it even worse, making parking of them as much or more 
of a problem for cities, as driving them.  They become very inefficienty 
used, and their high ownership forces owners to use them more than 
necessary.  And the accountability needed for safety has totally broken 
down, with drivers claiming a 'right to privacy' whenever technology is 
suggested as a measure/remedy.

We need to think of our project as the rebuilding the commons of these 
rights-of-way.  We need to focus on access not mobility, as the former 
focuses on the trip to _minimize_ of footprint of each; while mobility tries 
to _maximize_ the total units of distance traveled by each users, making 
speed a personal value that ruins the sharing that is natural to a commons.

Before we point a finger at officials who we claim don't get it, we need to 
be better ourselves at getting to the basis of our task.  It is not just 
that transportation has to be viewed as a single system, but at the way 
transportation coexists in these ROWs and the other functions that occur 
there, and are equally important for human ecology.

I see a much stronger need for local governance units having a role in the 
utilization of the ROWs, and their natural bias toward satisfying short, 
slow trips, and transit for slightly longer ones.  The history of 
transportation (a word that arrived with the nation-state and formal 
economics) is one of what Ostrom et al. call "coarser" scales of governance 
imposing their bias towards faster, more formal travel over the 'riff-raff' 
(their term) of local commerce/movement/access.

Unfortunately, by discussing this at an international scale, we probably 
impose the 'coarse' scale onto our thinking.

Chris Bradshaw
Ottawa, Canada