[sustran] Happy New Year and BTW what is the New Mobility Agenda all about?

[eric britton]

This is to invite your attention to a New Year's Day offering on Network
Dispatches which will I am sure interest at least some of you, and if you
have comments or suggestions for improvement, this would be a great time to
have them.

 

The full piece is available at www.networkdispatches.org. Here you have the
first paragraphs:

 

 

What is the New Mobility Agenda?  2013 Style

 

To kick off the New Year, it would seem like a good idea for us to remind
our readers and contributors (and ourselves) of what we think this phrase
means. This is important here since these words are at the core of what
World Streets is all about, as well as the main meat of our in-process
collaborative book for 2013, No Excuses, Sir!  (A tale of cities, indolence,
complexity and, finally,  simplicity) . 

 

This phrase, which has been around since 1988, has two main facets.  First
it encompasses  a wide range of transportation service and access
arrangements, new mobility in short.  Second, comes the Agenda part,
basically the manner in which we can build a strategy which will enable our
cities to move toward a much broader and more efficient range of mobility
and access alternatives.  Let's start with the service end of things.

 

Old Mobility

 

But before we dig into new mobility, let's take a moment to review quickly
what the other thing, "old mobility" is all about. 

 

It's simple. The sole of the unnamed but no less real  Old Mobility Agenda
was to have a structured, ambitious, highly costly and often highly
destructive in human and social  terms for all that relates to motorized
transport, the golden-haired poster child of the twentieth century. 

 

Beyond this, but at a far lower level of cost and structured attention has
been traditional public transport, which with a few notable exceptions boils
down in most places to -- sorry! --  poor folks transport (i.e., something
along the lines of minimum mobility for all those who are not able to own
and operate their own cars).  And even in places that have over the last
three decades  spent billions to create fixed rout scheduled services,
public transport has remained the very poor cousin of the car-oriented
policy and investment practices of most city and national governments. 

 

New Mobility =Transport/Mobility/Access/Presence

 

Now that we have that clear, on to New Mobility which offers a much broader
range of movement, access and strategic alternatives.  Let's get started
with . . .

 

[The seven pillars et al follow here: http://wp.me/p1fsqb-131 ]