From edelman at greenidea.info Mon Jul 3 01:54:47 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2006 18:54:47 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Test drive... a cityscape Message-ID: <2116.62.245.95.24.1151859287.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Test driving a cityscape The world's cities are growing all the time, and in France some are being modelled by computer for the purposes of urban redevelopment. Excerpt starting with my favourite bench expert (seriously): Architect Jan Gehl says: "You can never animate in a machine how people would like to sit on a bench or not like to sit on a bench. "It will always be a balance between using really genius technological tools to short-cut the working processes, to be able to assess quicker what you've thought up, and studying the real-life situation and using your own senses directly with the environment." Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/5130712.stm ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From sujit at vsnl.com Mon Jul 3 16:37:00 2006 From: sujit at vsnl.com (Sujit Patwardhan) Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 13:07:00 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Car free Road in Pune Message-ID: <4cfd20aa0607030037l380bfbd2x9a7dcf9799f7195d@mail.gmail.com> 3 July 2006 Dear Sustraners, http://www.indiatogether.org/2006/may/env-walkplaza.htm Here is an article on the Walking Plaza on CarFree Mahatma Gandhi Road, Pune. Though the road becomes carfree only on only two days per week, (Saturdays and Sundays) we see this as a good start. Hopefully it will become a permanant pedestrian street. -- Sujit Sujit Patwardhan -- ------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060703/0e69dbbd/attachment.html From ashok.sreenivas at gmail.com Mon Jul 3 16:43:39 2006 From: ashok.sreenivas at gmail.com (Ashok Sreenivas) Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 13:13:39 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Urban water transport Message-ID: <44A8CAAB.3020605@gmail.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060703/036d255f/attachment.html From Alan.Howes at cbuchanan.co.uk Mon Jul 3 16:57:46 2006 From: Alan.Howes at cbuchanan.co.uk (Alan Howes) Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 08:57:46 +0100 Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport Message-ID: <324DCD7680954F468CF306EE5404F001024AABB2@mail01.cbuchanan.co.uk> Ashok - I can't really help that much - but I do know that Dubai has plans (partly implemented) for increasing urban water transport on The Creek (Abras). If you can find references to what they are doing I'm sure they would be useful. Alan -- Alan Howes Associate Transport Planner Colin Buchanan 4 St Colme Street Edinburgh EH3 6AA Scotland email: alan.howes@cbuchanan.co.uk tel: (0)131 226 4693 (switchboard) (0)7952 464335 (mobile) fax: (0)131 220 0232 www: http:/www.cbuchanan.co.uk/ ________________________________ From: sustran-discuss-bounces+alan.howes=cbuchanan.co.uk@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+alan.howes=cbuchanan.co.uk@list.jca.apc. org] On Behalf Of Ashok Sreenivas Sent: 03 July 2006 08:44 To: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Subject: [sustran] Urban water transport Can someone point me to good (preferably online) pointers to waterway based urban transport, covering issues such as its effectiveness, impact on environment, carrying capacity, economics, relationship to land use etc. Thanks in advance! Ashok ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ DISCLAIMER This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed. Unless you are the named addressee, or authorised to receive it for the addressee, you may not copy or use it, or disclose it to anyone else. If you have received this email in error please contact the sender by replying to this email. Any views expressed by an individual within this email which do not constitute or record professional advice relating to the business of Colin Buchanan, do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. Any professional advice or opinion contained within this email is subject to our terms and conditions of business. We have taken precautions to minimise the risk of transmitting software viruses. We do not accept liability for any loss or damage caused by software viruses. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060703/40419d72/attachment.html From roland at actrix.gen.nz Mon Jul 3 17:19:27 2006 From: roland at actrix.gen.nz (Roland Sapsford) Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 20:19:27 +1200 Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport In-Reply-To: <44A8CAAB.3020605@gmail.com> References: <44A8CAAB.3020605@gmail.com> Message-ID: <44A8D30F.6020209@actrix.gen.nz> Auckland New Zealand has a relatively comprehensive ferry system - but I have seen little evaluation of the kind you seek published on the web. It all tends to be bundled together as public transport, together with rail and bus. You could have a look at www.arta.govt.nz - which is the public transport planning agency for Auckland - emails to key people may generate more info than a web search alone. Kind Regards Roland Sapsford Wellington, New Zealand Ashok Sreenivas wrote: > Can someone point me to good (preferably online) pointers to waterway > based urban transport, covering issues such as its effectiveness, > impact on environment, carrying capacity, economics, relationship to > land use etc. Thanks in advance! > > Ashok > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From ibike at ibike.org Tue Jul 4 00:14:20 2006 From: ibike at ibike.org (Ibike/International Bicycle Fund) Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 08:14:20 -0700 Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport In-Reply-To: <44A8CAAB.3020605@gmail.com> Message-ID: <002801c69eb3$5ce9d240$0400a8c0@domain.actdsltmp> Washington State, USA, runs the largest ferry system in the US. There website is http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/index.cfm. Their runs tend to go from urban terminals to less densely populated satellite communities. They have address some of the issues you raise, but you will probably have to contact them for answers to your specific questions. Seattle has a season "water taxi". There is information at http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/watertaxistudy.htm Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada also have water taxis and aqua-bus service that might provide you with insight. -----Original Message----- Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 12:44 AM To: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Subject: [sustran] Urban water transport Can someone point me to good (preferably online) pointers to waterway based urban transport, covering issues such as its effectiveness, impact on environment, carrying capacity, economics, relationship to land use etc. Thanks in advance! Ashok -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060703/bd683a50/attachment.html From ranjithsd at sltnet.lk Tue Jul 4 13:01:10 2006 From: ranjithsd at sltnet.lk (Ranjith de Silva) Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2006 10:01:10 +0600 Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport In-Reply-To: <44A8CAAB.3020605@gmail.com> Message-ID: <004401c69f1e$7c4c2c80$0265a8c0@rangith74aab7d> Dear Ashok You may try IFRTD website www.ruralwaterways.org but this site has more focus on rural area. You may also try the World Bank Transport site and Ports and water borne transport. Cheers! Ranjith Ranjith de Silva Asia Regional Coordinator International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD) C/o: 319/10, Ramanayaka Mawatha, Erawwala, Pannipitiya, Sri Lanka. Phone: +94 11 2842972 Fax: +94 11 2856188 Email: ranjith@ifrtd.org web: www.ifrtd.org "The IFRTD is a global network of individuals and organisations working together towards improved access and mobility for the rural poor in developing countries" -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+ranjithsd=sltnet.lk@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+ranjithsd=sltnet.lk@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Ashok Sreenivas Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 1:44 PM To: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Subject: [sustran] Urban water transport Can someone point me to good (preferably online) pointers to waterway based urban transport, covering issues such as its effectiveness, impact on environment, carrying capacity, economics, relationship to land use etc. Thanks in advance! Ashok -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060704/e740e83f/attachment.html From sri at giaspn01.vsnl.net.in Mon Jul 3 19:00:52 2006 From: sri at giaspn01.vsnl.net.in (Prof J G Krishnayya) Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:30:52 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport In-Reply-To: <44A8D30F.6020209@actrix.gen.nz> Message-ID: <005601c69e87$a9630410$0e01a8c0@JGK> Goa state, in western India has many many creeks and rivers, some 20 of which are served by ferry crossings. I don't know of any specific websites, but there are many Goa-specific Lists you could try for. J g Krishnayya ==================== Prof J G Krishnayya Director, Systems Research Institute, 17-A Gultekdi, PUNE 411037, India www.sripune.org Tel +91-20-2426-0323 jkrishnayya@yahoo.com Res 020-2636-3930 sri@giaspn01.vsnl.net.in Fax +91-20-2444-7902 -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+sri=pn1.vsnl.net.in@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+sri=pn1.vsnl.net.in@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Roland Sapsford Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 1:49 PM To: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport Auckland New Zealand has a relatively comprehensive ferry system - but I have seen little evaluation of the kind you seek published on the web. It all tends to be bundled together as public transport, together with rail and bus. You could have a look at www.arta.govt.nz - which is the public transport planning agency for Auckland - emails to key people may generate more info than a web search alone. Kind Regards Roland Sapsford Wellington, New Zealand Ashok Sreenivas wrote: > Can someone point me to good (preferably online) pointers to waterway > based urban transport, covering issues such as its effectiveness, > impact on environment, carrying capacity, economics, relationship to > land use etc. Thanks in advance! > > Ashok > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From schipper at wri.org Tue Jul 4 09:50:10 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 20:50:10 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport Message-ID: Someone has to say Goa for it! >>> sri@giaspn01.vsnl.net.in 07/03/06 6:00 AM >>> Goa state, in western India has many many creeks and rivers, some 20 of which are served by ferry crossings. I don't know of any specific websites, but there are many Goa-specific Lists you could try for. J g Krishnayya ==================== Prof J G Krishnayya Director, Systems Research Institute, 17-A Gultekdi, PUNE 411037, India www.sripune.org Tel +91-20-2426-0323 jkrishnayya@yahoo.com Res 020-2636-3930 sri@giaspn01.vsnl.net.in Fax +91-20-2444-7902 -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+sri=pn1.vsnl.net.in@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+sri=pn1.vsnl.net.in@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Roland Sapsford Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 1:49 PM To: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Subject: [sustran] Re: Urban water transport Auckland New Zealand has a relatively comprehensive ferry system - but I have seen little evaluation of the kind you seek published on the web. It all tends to be bundled together as public transport, together with rail and bus. You could have a look at www.arta.govt.nz - which is the public transport planning agency for Auckland - emails to key people may generate more info than a web search alone. Kind Regards Roland Sapsford Wellington, New Zealand Ashok Sreenivas wrote: > Can someone point me to good (preferably online) pointers to waterway > based urban transport, covering issues such as its effectiveness, > impact on environment, carrying capacity, economics, relationship to > land use etc. Thanks in advance! > > Ashok > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From johnson.craig at gmail.com Wed Jul 5 09:41:29 2006 From: johnson.craig at gmail.com (Craig Johnson) Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2006 18:41:29 -0600 Subject: [sustran] nytimes article on cars in china Message-ID: here is a very interesting though lengthy article about car ownership in China that appeared in the NY times on Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/magazine/02china.html particularly vexing to me while reading the article is the importance of "status" that has surrounded and aided the automobile boom in china. It seems to me that practicality and convenience are not necessarily the main draw of owning a car, instead it is the status of owning and driving a car. Craig Johnson -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- July 2, 2006 Capitalist Roaders By TED CONOVER Zhu Jihong cannot wait to get started on his holiday road trip. At 6 a.m. on Saturday, the first day of the October National Day week (one of three annual Golden Weeks in China, intended to promote internal tourism and ensure that workers take some time off), Zhu has parked his brand-new Hyundai Tucson S.U.V., with its limited-edition package of extras like walnut trim and chrome step-bar, in front of my hotel in downtown Beijing. He is half an hour early, but he is in a hurry. He cannot believe I'm not ready. Li Lu, a friend who is coming along as my interpreter, has found me in the hotel restaurant. She was rousted even earlier than I, at her apartment a couple of miles away, and calculates that Zhu, to make it into Beijing from his home on the city's outskirts, must have gotten up at 4. She adds that she's a bit concerned: she helped me book a spot on this car trip and had assumed that the driver whose car we shared would be a person of, well, culture. But Zhu, she says, is "not educated." "What do you mean?" I ask as we leave the hotel's revolving glass doors and come upon Zhu. Zhu is nicely dressed, in the dark slacks, leather loafers and knit shirt of many Chinese businessmen. Cigarette in one hand, hair recently cut and wavy on top, Zhu, in his 40's, has a somewhat dashing, youthful air. Before Li Lu and I are out the revolving door, he is at the back of the Hyundai, making room for my knapsack and pointing me in the direction of the leather passenger seat. He stops to shake my hand only after I pause and offer mine. Li Lu is our intermediary and tries to effect the introduction I'm after, but Zhu is not one for formalities; he gives a tiny nod, then circles the car, hawks noisily and spits by his door, climbs in and turns the key. Li Lu, from the back seat, gives me a look that says: See? What did I tell you? But as the car fills with smoke from his cigarette and the CB radio battles for supremacy with operatic Red Army tunes on the CD player, I don't much mind Zhu's manners (which, Li Lu explains, reflect the factory owner's peasant background) because we're off on an adventure and Zhu's excitement is infectious. Our trip is a seven-day excursion from Beijing to Hubei Province in Central China, including stops at the Three Gorges Dam and a mountainous forest preserve called Shennongjia, fabled home to a race of giant hairy ape-men. And though the trendy enterprise we are part of is known as a "self-driving tour," we are not going alone: a dozen carfuls of other people have signed on with the tour, organized by the Beijing Target Auto Club, one of the for-profit driving clubs that are sprouting all over China. Zhu is ready for a long day at the wheel ? our destination, Nanyang, is more than 500 miles away ? but it's going to be even longer than he thinks. Our rendezvous with the other cars at the Zhuozhou rest stop, normally an hour away, will be delayed four hours, as thick fog closes the expressway. Heavy rain will fall, and our early start will count for little by midday as the highways swell with holiday traffic. There will be wrecks, like the fatal one-car rollover we'll pass on a bridge around midnight, an upside-down Beijing-plated Mitsubishi. The hotel's dinner will be waiting for us at 1 a.m., and we'll all be happy to see our rooms. But right now Zhu is pouring himself tea from a thermos and telling Li Lu how rich he is and how lucky we are to be in his car. "He says he is an excellent driver and we will go very fast," she reports wearily. The figures behind China's car boom are stunning. Total miles of highway in the country: at least 23,000, more than double what existed in 2001, and second now only to the United States. Number of passenger cars on the road: about 6 million in 2000 and about 20 million today. Car sales are up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period a year ago; every day, 1,000 new cars (and 500 used ones) are sold in Beijing. The astronomic growth of China's car-manufacturing industry will soon hit home for Americans and Europeans as dirt-cheap Chinese automobiles start showing up for sale here over the next two or three years. (Think basic passenger car for $10,000, luxury S.U.V. for $19,000.) But of course the story is not only about construction and production; car culture is taking root in China, and in many ways it looks like ours. City drivers, stuck in ever-growing jams, listen to traffic radio. They buy auto magazines with titles like The King of Cars, AutoStyle, China Auto Pictorial, Friends of Cars, Whaam ("The Car ? The Street ? The Travel ? The Racing"). Two dozen titles now compete for space in kiosks. The McDonald's Corporation said last month that it expects half of its new outlets in China to be drive-throughs. Whole zones of major cities, like the Asian Games Village area in Beijing, have been given over to car lots and showrooms. In other ways, though, the Chinese are still figuring cars out and doing things their way. Take the phrase used to describe our expedition: "self-driving trip." It is called self-driving to contrast it with the more customary idea of driving in China: that someone else drives you. Until recently, everyone important enough to own a car was also important enough to have his or her own driver. Traditions grew up around this, like the chauffeur joining his boss at the table for meals while on duty ? something still commonly seen. But those practices are growing fusty. What are new and explosively popular are car clubs ? some organized around the idea of travel, like the Beijing Target Auto Club, and others organized around the idea of. . .well, simply fun. The Beijing VW Polo Club, for example, has an active Web site and hundreds of youthful members. (The Polo is a VW model popular in Europe and Latin America and now manufactured in China as well.) Club members meet regularly to learn about maintenance, deliver toys to orphans and take weekend pleasure drives reminiscent of America in the 30's and 40's. To celebrate the 2008 Beijing Olympics, four-dozen members recently turned up in a giant parking lot to form the Olympic logo with their compact, candy-colored cars, each circle a different hue. Single members have found mates in the club, and at least one of their weddings featured an all-Polo procession through the streets of Beijing. In the West, cars can still excite, but the family car soon becomes part of the furniture. In China, however, it's nothing of the sort. Li Anding, author of two books on the car in China and the country's leading automotive journalist, told me why when he invited me to join some of his industry pals for dinner in Beijing. "The desire for cars here is as strong as in America, but here the desire was repressed for half a century," he began. All private cars were confiscated shortly after the Communists came into power in 1949, supposedly because they were symbols of the capitalist lifestyle. Having a car became the exclusive privilege of party officials. Across the table, Li Anding's colleague Li Tiezheng explained that "people my age loved Russian movies. They gave us the idea we should all own a car, and we all wondered why we couldn't." Li Tiezheng bought his first car ? a Polish-made Fiat ? when private ownership was finally permitted in the mid-1990's. But the stigma against ownership was still huge. "The pressure was so great, I couldn't tell anyone. I lied that I had borrowed it." That didn't last long. By 2000, enough regulations had been removed, and enough people were making money, that car ownership became a reality for many Chinese for the first time. Li Anding, born in 1949, the year the Communists came to power, said he was still astonished at the change: "When I started writing about cars, I never expected to see private cars in China in my generation, much less some of the world's fanciest cars, being driven every day." As the men around the table listened to Li's history and added to it, there was a palpable sense of pride. This wasn't simply progress on the level of a convenience ? analogous, say, to your neighborhood moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. To them it was China finally entering the world stage and participating fully in human progress. It had the additional meaning of something long denied that could finally be acquired, like a wrong being rectified. Over and over again, the group described car ownership with a term I would never have thought to use: "Once China opened up and Chinese people could see the other side of the world and know how people lived there, you could no longer limit the right to buy cars." "This right is something that has been ours all along." "Driving is our right." When Li Lu noticed the sign for the Zhuozhou Service Area of the Jingshi Expressway, Zhu Jihong was on one of his favorite subjects: destinations. He had done self-driving to Mongolia and Manchuria, he said, to Xinjiang and to Xi'an and the Silk Road. He made a round trip to Tibet ? fantastic! ? and was considering one to Hong Kong. The main problem with our current itinerary, in his opinion, was that it was too short: "A week isn't long enough to really feel like you've been away." His wife was less and less interested in these odysseys, preferring, lately, to stay home and mind the hotel and restaurant he had bought near his hometown outside Beijing. And his son, oddly enough, wasn't interested in driving at all. Li Lu interrupted Zhu and made sure he noticed ? this was where we were to pull off and finally meet the group. Though it was early afternoon now and Zhu had been driving for hours, he barely looked tired. I thought to peek at the odometer of his two-month-old Hyundai as he slowed; it showed 7,700 kilometers, or nearly 4,800 miles. That was an annual rate of nearly 30,000 miles, and most of them would be pleasure driving. Though the parking lot was the first time most members of the trip had seen one another, they had been talking for hours: each driver, before today, had stopped by the Beijing Target Auto Club office to pick up a CB radio and rooftop antenna. The rendezvous was on one side of the lot, and in the middle of the group was a vehicle with the biggest antenna of all, a thickly bumpered, sticker-plastered, red-flagged Chinese-made four-by-four belonging to the president of the Target club, Zhao Xiangjie. Zhao and his truck were decked out for safari: he was wearing a khaki utility vest with many zippers, busily meeting members of the group as they arrived. Across the lot, a self-driving group from Guangzhou was similarly mustered, easy to spot by the big stickers with numbers on everyone's side doors and rear windows. And this, it turned out, was Zhao's next duty, to adorn each vehicle with its numbers. My driver, Zhu, accepted his with great ceremony, cleaning his doors first to ensure good adhesion, making sure the number decals were straight and even. If one theme here was safari, another was road rally, the decals suggesting that everyone was part of a speedy team. Though most are organized around the idea of trips, Chinese car clubs come in many flavors. Some are run by dealers (like a Honda dealership in Guangzhou), and others (like the VW Polo Club in Beijing) are nonprofit and organized around a particular model. At least one is the offshoot of an outdoor-recreational-gear manufacturer. Many are just for four-wheel-drive vehicles and aim to go to the back of beyond. Travel agencies sponsor some; others are run for and by motorcyclists. One of Zhao Xiangjie's advantages, at the Beijing Target Auto Club, is good connections in officialdom. He has worked as a composer, filmmaker and official celebration organizer; he knows important people and has succeeded in getting them to steer big commissions his way. His auto-club offices are in the government-run Olympics Center. In a speech he gave to the 2005 Auto Clubs and Fans C.E.O. Forum, I heard him assert that more government involvement was needed if automobile-related industries like the clubs were to develop in an optimal fashion. I sensed that he wouldn't mind being China's first under secretary of car clubs. But an alternate strategy may have more momentum. Back in Beijing, a young man named Chen Ming helps run what appears to be the largest self-driving organization in China: the auto-club arm of Beijing traffic radio FM 103.9. His employees, around 100 of them, occupy a floor and a half of a midsize office building. Chen Ming has high volume and a rapidly growing business. Linking an auto club to traffic radio seems inspired. Members pay $27 a year and receive benefits that include group insurance rates, gasoline rebates, "auto rescue" within Beijing's Fifth Ring Road, free rental cars if a repair takes more than three days, et cetera. Chen got his start in the business as Zhao's prot?g? ? he was assistant manager of the Beijing Target Auto Club ? and when I spoke with him in Beijing, he shared his belief that Zhao's approach, his eagerness to stay involved with the government, is outdated. Maybe half of the vehicles in our group were S.U.V.'s and the rest were passenger cars, almost all with foreign labels ? Toyota, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Citro?n ? not the cheaper Chinese models that made up the majority of cars on the road, the Fotons, Geelys, Cherys, JAC's. (More than 40 local brands are currently manufactured in China.) One of the foreign cars caught my eye: a flashy white Volvo S80, driven by a man who was also a distinctive dresser. With his white leather loafers, tight jeans, white belt with a big silver buckle and white shirt ("Verdace," read the logo), Fan Li, a television producer, cut an intriguing figure. He was accompanied on this trip by his pretty 24-year-old daughter, Fan Longyin, who was recently back from film school in France. Longyin was quickly becoming friends with Jia Lin, a single female reporter for The Beijing Youth Daily, who was in her 30's. Jia wore a tan leather jacket with a winged glossy-lip logo on the back that said "Flying Kiss." Like me, Jia came without a car, but it looked as if she would start riding with the Fans. And then there was the attractive young family in the white Volkswagen Passat, the Chens: Xiaohong (who uses the name Peter with English speakers), the personable information-technology executive; his wife, Yin Aiqin, an electric power consultant; and their 4-year-old daughter, Yen Yi Yi, whom, I would soon learn, was already taking voice lessons at home from a member of the Beijing Opera. More nerdy but genial were the bespectacled Wangs, in their Citro?n Xsara: she ran part of the back office of Air China; he worked for an international freight firm. They, too, had an unattached passenger who shared the driving and expenses. He was the urbane Zhou Yan, a partner in China's third-largest law firm. And then there were the businessmen. Organized by a cement-plant owner, Li Xingjie, these 10 or 11 guys from the same Beijing suburb, Fangshan, rode in S.U.V.'s and tended to stick to themselves. Some of them owned coal-processing plants, which meant they were rich. Soon all 11 cars were bedecked with numbers and the club logo. Pit stops and snack purchases were completed; the service area looked a bit like one on an American toll road, though there was no landscaping, the simple restaurant was not a fast-food franchise and the convenience store was not as elaborately stocked as in the States. The gas station ? state-run Sinopec ? filled Zhu's Hyundai for about $1.85 a gallon, and I paid in cash, gas and tolls being my contribution to expenses. (Sinopec stations only recently began accepting credit cards.) Everyone piled back in their cars, and we hit the road. We would reconvene for dinner. China's first modern expressway, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway, was built in the early 1990's by the Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Y.S. Wu. Wu studied civil engineering at Princeton in the mid-50's, when construction was beginning on the U.S. Interstate Highway System. At the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike was being widened from four lanes to many lanes, and Wu has said it inspired him. (His powerful firm, Hopewell Holdings, is named after a town near Princeton.) Though Wu ran short of money and the ambitious project had to be rescued by the Chinese government, the toll-road model of highway development caught on. Wu's Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway was the beginning of an infrastructure binge that seems to be only picking up steam: the government recently announced a target of 53,000 freeway miles by 2035. (The U.S. Interstate Highway System, 50 years old last week, presently comprises about 46,000 miles of roads.) Some new roads, especially in the less-developed western parts of the nation, are nearly empty: China is encouraging road construction ahead of industrial development and population settlement, assuming those will follow. The goal, of course, is not simply to replicate the boom of coastal areas, where the majority of the country's population now lives. China's larger aim is to consolidate the nation. Its version of Manifest Destiny ? the "great development of the West" or "Go West" policy begun in January 2000 ? envisions far-western territories, like Tibet and the fuel-rich province Xinjiang (the name translates as "New Frontier"), fully integrated, ethnically and economically, with the rest of the country. It seems quite likely that, similar to the case with American history, local indigenous cultures stand to lose along the way. What the United States gained (and lost) with the Pony Express, covered wagons and steam trains, China may achieve with roads and automobiles. If highways in China's west are so far awaiting traffic, easterners have the opposite concern. As we headed south from Shijiazhuang toward Zhengzhou, the roads packed with vacationers and truck traffic, Zhu jostled for position with all the other people who were late getting where they were going. His style of driving helped me understand better why China, with 2.6 percent of the world's vehicles, had 21 percent of its road fatalities (in 2002, the most recent year for which figures are available). Of course, there must be many reasons. The large number of new drivers is one; few of today's Chinese drivers grew up driving, and road-safety awareness seems low. Many roads are probably dangerous ? though not, I would venture to say, the beautiful new expressway we were on. It was like an American Interstate, only sleeker: the guardrails were angular and attractive, not fat and ugly, and in the divider strip there was typically a well-pruned hedge, high enough to protect drivers from the glare of beams from opposing traffic at night. Beyond the guardrails, grassy embankments sloped down to buffer areas carefully planted with a single species of tree, often poplar. The road surface was perfectly smooth, transitions even, signage sparse but clear. Periodically we saw orange-suited workers hand-pruning the center hedge or sweeping the wide shoulder with old handmade brooms. There was never a maintenance truck nearby; wherever they came from, they apparently walked. It was the sweepers I worried about. Officially, there were two lanes of travel in each direction. But each side also had a shoulder, and on this expressway, at least, the shoulder was exactly as wide as the travel lanes. Thus Zhu and others (despite signs asserting that it was forbidden) used the shoulder as the passing lane. Occasionally, of course, a sweeper would loom, or a disabled vehicle, and Zhu would slam on the brakes and veer into the truck lane. Once past the obstacle, he would floor it and swerve back out, brake once again, swerve, honk ? it was almost like being in a video game, except that video games end or you can walk away. We, on the other hand, had a long way to go. "Li Lu, does Mr. Zhu know that more Chinese die on the road every day than died here during the entire SARS epidemic?" I asked her. She translated. Zhu looked at me and laughed. "I think he didn't understand," she said. We consulted, and soon Li Lu announced from the back seat that we both really wished he would slow down a bit. Zhu looked at me sidelong and then, if anything, speeded up. he next morning Zhu was tired, finally, and asked if I wanted to drive. I hesitated for a moment. I had researched the issue and was fairly certain that foreign tourists were forbidden to drive between cities in China. Most Chinese, however, seem never to have considered the possibility of foreigners behind the wheel, and from the beginning, Zhao asked whether I would be willing to help with the driving. Far be it from me to shirk this responsibility. So I said sure and climbed into the driver's seat. This day's driving was different from the previous day's. As we moved farther from the coast and its expressways, we spent more time on national highways, which generally are two-lane and pass through a lot of towns. Everyone in the club stuck pretty close together, and there was a lot of chatting over the radio. Our leader, Zhao, began by apologizing for yesterday's overlong drive. Even if there hadn't been a highway closure due to fog, slowness due to rain and holiday congestion, it was too long a drive for the first day, and he was sorry. But he was also upbeat and sounded excited about getting to Three Gorges Dam that afternoon. He moderated the CB chat that followed, prompting each car's occupants to take turns introducing themselves. Some told a joke, some sang a song. Fan, in the white Volvo, put on an Elvis Presley CD and held his mike to the speaker, playing "Love Me Tender" in honor of me, Elvis's countryman. As we passed through one village an hour past breakfast, a clamor rose for a pit stop. The men had little trouble finding places to relieve themselves near the edge of town, but women were in more of a bind. China's car culture ? not to mention consumer culture ? has not yet reached the countryside, and there was no restaurant nearby, no fast-food joint, no gas station/convenience store. Chen Yin Aiqin, her daughter at her side, knocked tentatively on the door of a farmhouse and was soon welcomed inside and ushered to the latrine out back. Afterward, before their car pulled away, she dashed back to the farmer's door with a small box of chocolate from Beijing. The lack of infrastructure for touring drivers is one reason that these organized self-driving tours are so popular. Besides having planned in advance (through arrangements with local travel agents) where we would stop to eat and sleep every day, Zhao had an expert mechanic in his four-by-four: repair garages were few and far between, and one of the Beijingers' main fears was breaking down far from home, with nobody trustworthy nearby to help. The national roads, while more interesting to drive than the expressways, were also more nerve-racking. There were considerable numbers of people on bicycles, on foot and on small tractors; there were crossroads; and least expected by me, there were many places where I had to swerve toward the middle of the road because of farmers having appropriated a strip of pavement along the edge for drying their grain, usually corn. Sometimes the grain was laid out on blue tarps; other times the drying zone was outlined by rocks or boards; more than once, traffic slowed because of it. I had heard of Chinese farmers sometimes laying their wheat across the road so that passing vehicles would thresh it for them. But there was something aggressive about this appropriation of the highway. The suggestion of rural hostility toward traffic and the number of people using the road for walking put me in mind of the famous "BMW Case," which received a lot of media attention two years before. A rich woman in a BMW, probably traveling on a road like this, was bumped by a farmer transporting his onion cart to market. Enraged, she struck the farmer and then revved her car and drove into the crowd. The peasant's wife was killed, but despite widespread outrage, China's Lizzie Grubman received only a suspended sentence. BMW's seemed to be a sort of class-divide lightning rod. Recently, the number of kidnappings for ransom has shot up in China ? the government reported 3,863 abductions in 2004, higher than the 3,000 a year reported on average in Colombia, the previous world leader. "In one case," according to The China Daily, "police searching the apartment of kidnappers in Guangdong Province found a list of all BMW owners in the city that appeared to have come from state vehicle registration rolls." I was hoping to needle Zhu a bit, and so I asked him, if he was so rich, why didn't he have a BMW? "Bad value," he said, explaining that while many foreign carmakers had plants in China and produced high-quality cars at a reasonable price, BMW's were all imported, with huge taxes added on. And indeed, this is true: tariffs and taxes add about 50 percent to the price of imported cars, making them high-status items. If you want to be really ostentatious, you do what rich guys like coal-mine operators from Shaanxi Province increasingly do and come into the city to buy a Hummer ? those cost upward of $200,000. But Zhu thought that was ridiculous. The Volkswagen Passat he kept at home for his wife to drive was made in China, he said, as were growing numbers of other excellent foreign-designed cars, all of them produced under joint ventures with Chinese companies (some state-owned or -controlled), an arrangement the government hoped would encourage the growth of a domestic car industry. "Like my Hyundai," Zhu said proudly, putting his cigarette in his mouth so he could pat the dashboard. "Made in Beijing." Not long after lunch, we started seeing signs for the Three Gorges Dam and accessed the site through tunnels along an expensively built mountainside road. Security was tight, with numerous guard posts, cameras and warning signs, and I was happy to swap seats with Zhu as we pulled into a roadside waiting area ? just before an official came by to collect every driver's license. A guide boarded our leader's car and, over the radio, began a running commentary. I asked Zhu, between her remarks, what he thought of my driving. "He says you are a good driver, but he has some advice," Li Lu reported. "He says to improve, you must be more brave!" Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest construction projects in history, seemed a fitting first attraction for our trip, evoking superlatives in this land of superlatives. It has cost an estimated $75 billion so far (including corruption and relocation costs); it will require more than a million people to be relocated; it would generate more hydroelectric power than any dam ever had; and it spans the Yangtze, the third-longest river in the world. The reservoir began filling up in 2003 and has six years left to go; it presents a huge military target. Like so much in China, the scale is almost too large to fathom. The 30-odd people in our group parked and then boarded buses that took us up to a visitor center above the dam; we peeked at a model dam indoors and then, like scores of others, scrambled around the viewpoint, taking lots of pictures. Fan turned out to have a serious interest in photography: his daughter posed, posed and posed again as her father assumed an exaggerated wide stance with his heavy Nikon digital camera. Others focused on the astonishing dam, proudly making sure I got a good look, witnesses to a great change who were, themselves, harbingers of a change. Zhu was back at the wheel the next day as we drove from the Three Gorges area to Hongping, a town deep in Hubei Province and the jumping-off point for visits to Shennongjia, the forest reserve where everyone hoped to see a yeti. His Hyundai had a six-CD changer in the dash, and among the titles in it were "The Relax Music of Automobiles," which turned out to be instrumental versions of the love songs of Deng Lijun, the Taiwanese pop singer of the 1970's. What Zhu really loved, however, was the old-time music on "The Red Sun: A Collection of Military Songs, Volume II." He played the CD again and again. The soaring, triumphalist music evoked bygone days, and I expressed surprise that a modern business guy like him loved the old socialist music so much. Zhu responded that it was the music he grew up with. He had worked on a farm, he confirmed. His grandfather became rich, but the Communists took it all away. "Don't you dislike Mao for that?" I asked. He looked at me full on when Li Lu translated the question and then, at 60 miles per hour, turned sideways in his seat to show me the pin on his left lapel. It was a dime-size brass relief bust of the Great Helmsman himself. Steering with his knees, he put his chin to his chest, unpinned it and handed it to me as a gift. "Many people still admire Mao very much," Li Lu explained. "They know he made mistakes, but they also think he did much good. He got rid of the Kuomintang. He brought China together. He is still a very big hero, like a god to some." Fan, the television producer, I had noticed, was also in the worshipful camp. He had the leader's portrait, in Lucite, affixed to the top of the dashboard of his Volvo so that he could not see anything through the windshield without Mao appearing in his peripheral vision. After I asked about that and complimented him on the DVD screens built into the back of the front seats (for rear-seat passengers), Fan invited me into the Volvo for the better part of a morning's drive. Longyin, his daughter, took a seat in the back, along with Jia Lin, the reporter, and offered some background on her father. "My parents both suffered a lot in the Cultural Revolution," she began. Fan interrupted impatiently. "Oh!" Longyin said. "My father is saying: 'There is no such thing as a perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family ? everything. Now he's gone, but I want to go back to that time, when people shared everything."' But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn't sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn't be able to own new Volvos? "I think now is a necessary period," Fan said, as his daughter translated. "We have to advance." "Capitalism is something we've been waiting to try for a long time," Longyin said, quickly adding: "Personally, I hate the whole Mao thing. I think it's weird. I don't miss the sound of those old days at all." She did miss France, however, and her French boyfriend. She said she hoped to play a part in the growth of the Chinese film industry, perhaps by becoming an actors' agent. And some time in the next two or three months, she hoped to get a driver's license. was pleased to get to Hongping. The mountain hamlet was shrouded in mist, and the air was cool. Steep hillsides covered with deciduous trees rose on either side, and a creek ran through town, reminiscent of Vermont. We arrived at our hotel early in the afternoon, a nice change. It was three stars, clean, basic, but without a restaurant, elevator or easy parking, and soon we were checking out. "Beijingers are very picky," Li Lu told me. They didn't like it, and so Zhao had to find another. The new place seemed only incrementally better to me, but others were satisfied by the change. At dinner, Zhao was back to apologizing profusely for his poor judgment. But the men, anyway, were more interested in getting soused, and the error was soon forgiven. When everyone rolled out of the restaurant, vendors were on the sidewalk, and Fan made us ? and them ? laugh with his uncanny shrill imitation of an older woman who had been hawking a melon. Zhou and others had heard there was a "cultural promotion" ? a show featuring local ethnic talent ? on the edge of town and proposed we attend en masse. Zhu demurred, asserting that a strip club would be more fun, if only one could be found. We walked there without him, arriving early and securing a row of seats in the front. Though Zhou, the lawyer, spoke little English, I very much enjoyed his company. He was witty and sophisticated and, after a drink, warm and outgoing; every time he opened his mouth, it seemed, he made Li Lu break into laughter. Zhu, on the other hand, was a challenge. Along with being his passenger, I was his roommate, a difficult proposition. He smoked heavily, whether while sitting naked after a shower, braying into the phone at his wife or watching TV in bed, his head propped up by pillows. Often I knew he was awake in the morning by the click of his lighter and the smoke wafting over my bed. He snored raucously. He didn't believe in lifting the toilet seat. And always he fell asleep with the television on. This wasn't such a bad thing: usually I just reached over to the night table and clicked it off with the remote. But that night in Hongping, there was a snag. When I came back from the cultural show, Zhu was lying in bed on top of his sheets, watching a famous black-and-white movie from 1956, "Railroad Guerrilla," about Chinese peasant fighters throwing off the yoke of their Japanese imperialist occupiers. The guerrillas were just entering the imperial administrator's quarters when I came out of the bathroom: an extended storm of hacking machetes ensued, the Japanese falling left and right. Zhu murmured appreciatively and soon drifted off. I watched Japanese get cut down until I couldn't believe any could be left alive on the planet and then, over Zhu's rising snores, looked for the remote. It was nowhere to be found. The television itself had no on-off button, and its plug was hidden behind a heavy dresser; I needed to find the remote itself. Finally I spotted it, poking out from underneath Zhu's butt. I turned him over and extracted it, put in my earplugs and went to sleep. The next morning, Li Lu sympathized with my desire to switch roommates. Zhou the lawyer had said he would happily share with me. But she declared it was an impossibility: Zhu would lose face if I abandoned him. "And there is nothing worse for a man like him than losing face," she said. The next morning we hiked through the misty, craggy hills of Shennongjia. The area, known as "the Roof of Central China," is a Unesco biosphere reserve of 272 square miles, with six peaks measuring up to 10,190 feet above sea level. It was equally famous, among our group, as the home of China's Bigfoot. This creature, in the local lore, lumbered through the mists with a big-bosomed mate; an artist's rendition of the hairy couple appeared in the corner of a park billboard. But though the trails were beautiful and mysterious and we could imagine an ape-man happy there, none were spotted. The police were directing traffic at the park entrance, and as we left, one officer noticed me in Zhu's passenger seat and waved us over. Foreigners are not permitted to travel in the direction we were headed, he declared, pointing to a sign. Zhu pulled over and summoned Zhao on the radio. Our entire group stopped, and major discussion ensued, which resulted, some 20 minutes later, in the policeman consenting to my passage. Zhao could be very persuasive. "What was that all about?" I asked Li Lu. "There are army bases in the mountains ahead," she said. "It is thought there are missiles there, to protect the Three Gorges Dam. You can't see them from the road, but the army is afraid of spies." "But times are changing, right?" I asked. She looked uncertain, and I wasn't sure the answer was yes. We drove for more than an hour, stopping for lunch in another little mountain town, Muyu. Halfway through the meal, a policeman looked in the room where we were eating. Uh-oh, I thought. As we left, a different policeman spotted me and uttered something grave. Zhao was summoned again. Other policemen arrived. My passport was requested, a phone call was made. Word came down: I had to go back. The old China was still around. Zhao took me aside reassuringly and pressed a roll of yuan bills into my hand. Li Lu and I were to take a taxi back to Hongping, he said, while he figured out an alternate plan. We would call his cellphone from there. The solution, we gathered, looked arduous: take a taxi, train and taxi, meeting up with the group the next night, or take a single long and expensive taxi, meeting up with them the next afternoon, but missing the Wudang Mountains and their monasteries famous for martial arts. As we waited for a driver, a call came in from the group up ahead: the cops in Muyu went home at dusk, they had heard. After dark, we should be able to blow through without any trouble. We consulted with some locals, and they concurred. And so it was decided. We zoomed through Muyu without a hitch and, around midnight, passed as well through a couple of halfhearted traffic-boom-across-the-road checkpoints staffed by soldiers. I entered my hotel room in Wudang around 2 a.m. Naked on his bed, Zhu was sawing loudly, the television was blaring and the lights were all on. It was good to be back. The next day we took a cable car to a cloud-shrouded monastery atop the Wudang Mountains. A particular temple there is said to be a place where cash offerings can influence your destiny. After conferring a moment with the attending monk, Jia Lin, the reporter, made a largish donation: 100 yuan, over $12. Li Lu explained to me that Jia really wanted to find a husband and hoped to effect that result. Jia's search, in fact, was the reason she came on this trip, which she imagined to be the kind of exciting adventure where you might meet a man. So far, however, things weren't panning out. So belief in prayer was alive in China. What was less clear to me, after my brush with the police in the mountains, was how many in the urban, affluent world of self-driving tourers still believed in government authority. My test question was speeding. National highways were typically posted with limits of 50 miles per hour, and expressways up to 75 miles per hour, and the orientation brochure that each driver had received from the Beijing Target Auto Club insisted that we adhere to those limits. ("This is only self-driving, not car racing!" the brochure read. "Speeding is not necessary.") Yet all the drivers, including Zhao, paid the rules no attention whatsoever, often driving 100 m.p.h. or more. Police cars were seldom seen; when drivers spotted them, to my surprise, they paid no attention at all. The cops rarely used radar, it turned out, and they almost never tried to pull you over. What did concern Zhu and the others, though, were the speed cameras mounted unobtrusively on poles in the median. If you went too fast past a camera, it snapped your picture, and the ticket arrived in the mail. Simple as that. Zhu knew the location of most of the cameras along his normal routes around Beijing, but whenever he headed afield, the bills really piled up ? sometimes $70 or $80 a month. His solution was friends in the police department. They had given him a special red license plate that was affixed beneath his regular one; he believed this stopped a lot of the tickets in their tracks. But Zhu ? like many others on the trip ? was also intrigued by a device in the Nissan S.U.V. of Li Xingjie, 42, the leader of the Fangshan businessmen's group. The short, bald man was widely envied among members of the tour for his radar detector, reputed to detect not only radar but also cameras. I joined him one afternoon, and he proudly demonstrated: the rumors were true, and the device also gave advance notice of tollbooths and service areas. Made in Taiwan, the detector cost Li $350 and, as it stated in English on its bottom, detected "all speed equipment on mainland!" He used to pay about $1,250 annually in fines, but no longer did. "But isn't this kind of seditious?" I asked via Li Lu. "Isn't this Taiwan helping to undermine the laws of the mainland?" On the contrary, Li said, "this detector helps me obey the law. You have to obey laws. We have to obey the government!" I wasn't sure whether he was sincere. As we blew by an aging police cruiser at over 100 (the cruiser, by my reckoning, was traveling closer to 50), I asked him to help me unravel more mysteries of Chinese highway law enforcement. "Why isn't anybody worried about those police? Why don't they chase anybody and give out tickets?" That's just not how it's done here, Li said. Occasionally you were hit with an expressway fine when you stopped at the next tollbooth, but ordinarily, unless there had been an accident or some other irregularity, cops wouldn't chase you; tickets just arrived in the mail. Police cars were slow, but the mails were reliable. He portrayed himself as very straight: "Twenty years ago, I was driving a tractor ? I was a model peasant! There were almost no cars in China. I didn't learn to drive until 1988. "Under Deng Xiaoping, I got lucky because I was uneducated. Educated people think in traditional ways, but Deng said we should take chances." He did, and now he owns the Beijing Fangshan Banbidian Cement Factory, which he started when he was 28. Li Xingjie was mild-mannered and unassuming, but when I later showed Li Lu his business card, she was in awe: "This cellphone prefix means he has had the phone a long time ? since they were really expensive. He is very, very rich!" I considered this as the group reconvened for the last time, just on the other side of a glitzy new toll plaza, its lines limned in neon that had been illuminated as the sun started down. All of the cars in our group ? and the majority of cars you see in China, period ? were recent models. Almost all the wealth of the drivers was first-generation. The digital cameras, the shiny wristwatches, all of it where I come from said nouveau riche. But the pejorative back home is the normative here: practically every wealthy person is nouveau riche, so the idea is meaningless. The more instructive comparison, as we stood on this fancy bit of highway surrounded by rice fields and, here and there, people at work in them, was with the rural poor, the peasantry, the hundreds of millions of Chinese who do not yet (and, you imagine, will not in their lifetimes) share this prosperity. Many villages still are not connected to roads at all. When an expressway just south of here was completed last year, I was told sotto voce in Beijing, a series of demonstrations by peasants at a toll plaza delayed its opening. They were angry because the road had taken their land, and this, we are now seeing, is the story all over China: the government itself counted nearly 80,000 mass protests in 2005 alone. The country's economic growth is fantastic, the urban atmosphere heady. . .but then you see through the glass the peasants just in from the countryside, burlap bags at their feet, looking utterly from another planet, representatives of hundreds of millions of others, almost standing still while Zhu and Li zoom on by. We spent our last night in a four-star high-rise hotel in Luoyang. By the time I made it to our room with my suitcase, Zhu had already welcomed two sleek female "massage therapists" to our quarters; they were perched glamorously on the edge of my bed ? legs crossed, lips glossed, high heels dangling ? and beckoned me to join them. Zhu chortled with glee at my reticence, and I wondered which part of car travel he enjoyed most: the hours behind the wheel or the hours just after? Certainly, he seemed to take full advantage of all of them. The end was anticlimactic: everyone was heading back on the same expressway, and Beijing was less than a tank of gas away, so there was no further need to stick together. Chatter on the CB dropped off slowly until the radio was utterly quiet, and in terms of its group dimension anyway, the trip was over. Li Lu seemed pleased as Zhu's Hyundai eased into the perpetual traffic jam that is Beijing. She confessed that her friends were amazed she had gone on a trip like this: "I'm just a Beijing girl, a taxi girl!" ? not a sporting, auto-club type. But Zhu seemed a bit disappointed to be off the open road. He wanted to treat us to dinner at a favorite noodle restaurant near the city center, but first we had to get there. Creeping along on the highway, we talked about how the Beijing government was trying to control the huge new popularity of cars: one solution to the growing chaos of the streets has been to severely restrict motorcycle use in the city. Zhu thought that was better than Shanghai's fix: trying to cut down on car ownership by setting a high price (presently almost $5,000) on car registration. Trying to ease traffic and cut down on accidents, Shanghai had even banned bicycles from many main streets, news that still amazes me. A policeman friend of Zhu's met us at the restaurant and, in fact, even picked up the tab. (Zhu's rapport with the department was quite impressive.) I asked him about the street racing I had heard was becoming a problem in the city. Yes, he said, he had heard of it but had not seen it himself, yet. Zhu looked a bit too interested in the subject. In the coming days, Zhu would entertain me and others at the restaurant-hotel he ran as a hobby on the outskirts of Beijing; likewise, Zhou the lawyer would treat a group of us, including the Wangs of the Citro?n, to a fabulous dinner on trendy Houhai Lake. Clearly, nobody wanted the trip to end. ("Was it really that relaxing?" I had asked several of them, many times, after 12-hour days at the wheel; all had sworn that it was.) An ebullient atmosphere surrounds the automobile in China. You can see the excitement continuing, even growing, as more people buy cars: China now has fewer than seven of them for every thousand people, roughly the same level as the United States had in 1915. Everyone expects the ownership rate to keep growing, which means there could be 130 million vehicles on China's roads by 2020. By 2030, according to one estimate, there could be as many as in the United States. It is reminiscent of a fading romance in American life, this crush on the automobile, the thrill of car ownership, and it is fun to see. But in this area, American culture seems more mature than Chinese culture, and with the benefit of hindsight and statistics, it is not hard to spot a multicar pileup in the making. While I was in Beijing, the journal Nature reported that the city's air pollution was much worse than previously thought. Concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have increased 50 percent over the past 10 years, and the buildup is accelerating. According to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing's sulfur-dioxide levels in 2004 were more than double New York's, and airborne-particulate levels more than six times as high. Last year China enacted its first comprehensive emissions law, but it is expected to have little effect on the transport sector's copious carbon-dioxide emissions, which by 2030 are expected to exceed those of the United States, the world's largest producer. The nation's growing demands for gasoline make it increasingly our competitor for the finite global supply; by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, China may be importing as much oil as we do. On the snail-paced drive back into Beijing, Zhu had passed through a zone on the edge of town that had been bulldozed and was being rebuilt as upper-income, car-friendly suburbs. In fact, this was happening around cities all over China: new gated communities, new themed enclaves, all for the car-owning class. What was conspicuously missing was a corresponding investment in mass transit, in public spaces and public access. And, in heavy traffic at the end of a tiring trip, it was easy to worry that the Chinese, rather than charting an innovative, alternate route into the automotive era, were on their way down a road that looks a little too familiar. Ted Conover, a distinguished writer in residence at New York University, is at work on a book about roads. \ From schipper at wri.org Wed Jul 5 11:56:43 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2006 22:56:43 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: nytimes article on cars in china Message-ID: Interestingly, my colleague Wei-shuien Ng and I talked to the author after he heard our paper on cars in china (see www.embarq.wri.org and scroll down to the first piece on China).. - that 120 million cars in china just don't fit, period. He capture a lot of what I have been saying, then apologized at the last minute that it had all been cut (he phoned me in Turkey two weeks ago to get some sound bites). In the end the last few paragraphs sort of capture that kind of wall the Chinese are heading for. In short, what good is the thrill of owning a car when all you can do is crash into the driver in front of you? Lee >>> johnson.craig@gmail.com 07/04/06 8:41 PM >>> here is a very interesting though lengthy article about car ownership in China that appeared in the NY times on Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/magazine/02china.html particularly vexing to me while reading the article is the importance of "status" that has surrounded and aided the automobile boom in china. It seems to me that practicality and convenience are not necessarily the main draw of owning a car, instead it is the status of owning and driving a car. Craig Johnson -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- July 2, 2006 Capitalist Roaders By TED CONOVER Zhu Jihong cannot wait to get started on his holiday road trip. At 6 a.m. on Saturday, the first day of the October National Day week (one of three annual Golden Weeks in China, intended to promote internal tourism and ensure that workers take some time off), Zhu has parked his brand-new Hyundai Tucson S.U.V., with its limited-edition package of extras like walnut trim and chrome step-bar, in front of my hotel in downtown Beijing. He is half an hour early, but he is in a hurry. He cannot believe I'm not ready. Li Lu, a friend who is coming along as my interpreter, has found me in the hotel restaurant. She was rousted even earlier than I, at her apartment a couple of miles away, and calculates that Zhu, to make it into Beijing from his home on the city's outskirts, must have gotten up at 4. She adds that she's a bit concerned: she helped me book a spot on this car trip and had assumed that the driver whose car we shared would be a person of, well, culture. But Zhu, she says, is "not educated." "What do you mean?" I ask as we leave the hotel's revolving glass doors and come upon Zhu. Zhu is nicely dressed, in the dark slacks, leather loafers and knit shirt of many Chinese businessmen. Cigarette in one hand, hair recently cut and wavy on top, Zhu, in his 40's, has a somewhat dashing, youthful air. Before Li Lu and I are out the revolving door, he is at the back of the Hyundai, making room for my knapsack and pointing me in the direction of the leather passenger seat. He stops to shake my hand only after I pause and offer mine. Li Lu is our intermediary and tries to effect the introduction I'm after, but Zhu is not one for formalities; he gives a tiny nod, then circles the car, hawks noisily and spits by his door, climbs in and turns the key. Li Lu, from the back seat, gives me a look that says: See? What did I tell you? But as the car fills with smoke from his cigarette and the CB radio battles for supremacy with operatic Red Army tunes on the CD player, I don't much mind Zhu's manners (which, Li Lu explains, reflect the factory owner's peasant background) because we're off on an adventure and Zhu's excitement is infectious. Our trip is a seven-day excursion from Beijing to Hubei Province in Central China, including stops at the Three Gorges Dam and a mountainous forest preserve called Shennongjia, fabled home to a race of giant hairy ape-men. And though the trendy enterprise we are part of is known as a "self-driving tour," we are not going alone: a dozen carfuls of other people have signed on with the tour, organized by the Beijing Target Auto Club, one of the for-profit driving clubs that are sprouting all over China. Zhu is ready for a long day at the wheel our destination, Nanyang, is more than 500 miles away but it's going to be even longer than he thinks. Our rendezvous with the other cars at the Zhuozhou rest stop, normally an hour away, will be delayed four hours, as thick fog closes the expressway. Heavy rain will fall, and our early start will count for little by midday as the highways swell with holiday traffic. There will be wrecks, like the fatal one-car rollover we'll pass on a bridge around midnight, an upside-down Beijing-plated Mitsubishi. The hotel's dinner will be waiting for us at 1 a.m., and we'll all be happy to see our rooms. But right now Zhu is pouring himself tea from a thermos and telling Li Lu how rich he is and how lucky we are to be in his car. "He says he is an excellent driver and we will go very fast," she reports wearily. The figures behind China's car boom are stunning. Total miles of highway in the country: at least 23,000, more than double what existed in 2001, and second now only to the United States. Number of passenger cars on the road: about 6 million in 2000 and about 20 million today. Car sales are up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period a year ago; every day, 1,000 new cars (and 500 used ones) are sold in Beijing. The astronomic growth of China's car-manufacturing industry will soon hit home for Americans and Europeans as dirt-cheap Chinese automobiles start showing up for sale here over the next two or three years. (Think basic passenger car for $10,000, luxury S.U.V. for $19,000.) But of course the story is not only about construction and production; car culture is taking root in China, and in many ways it looks like ours. City drivers, stuck in ever-growing jams, listen to traffic radio. They buy auto magazines with titles like The King of Cars, AutoStyle, China Auto Pictorial, Friends of Cars, Whaam ("The Car The Street The Travel The Racing"). Two dozen titles now compete for space in kiosks. The McDonald's Corporation said last month that it expects half of its new outlets in China to be drive-throughs. Whole zones of major cities, like the Asian Games Village area in Beijing, have been given over to car lots and showrooms. In other ways, though, the Chinese are still figuring cars out and doing things their way. Take the phrase used to describe our expedition: "self-driving trip." It is called self-driving to contrast it with the more customary idea of driving in China: that someone else drives you. Until recently, everyone important enough to own a car was also important enough to have his or her own driver. Traditions grew up around this, like the chauffeur joining his boss at the table for meals while on duty something still commonly seen. But those practices are growing fusty. What are new and explosively popular are car clubs some organized around the idea of travel, like the Beijing Target Auto Club, and others organized around the idea of. . .well, simply fun. The Beijing VW Polo Club, for example, has an active Web site and hundreds of youthful members. (The Polo is a VW model popular in Europe and Latin America and now manufactured in China as well.) Club members meet regularly to learn about maintenance, deliver toys to orphans and take weekend pleasure drives reminiscent of America in the 30's and 40's. To celebrate the 2008 Beijing Olympics, four-dozen members recently turned up in a giant parking lot to form the Olympic logo with their compact, candy-colored cars, each circle a different hue. Single members have found mates in the club, and at least one of their weddings featured an all-Polo procession through the streets of Beijing. In the West, cars can still excite, but the family car soon becomes part of the furniture. In China, however, it's nothing of the sort. Li Anding, author of two books on the car in China and the country's leading automotive journalist, told me why when he invited me to join some of his industry pals for dinner in Beijing. "The desire for cars here is as strong as in America, but here the desire was repressed for half a century," he began. All private cars were confiscated shortly after the Communists came into power in 1949, supposedly because they were symbols of the capitalist lifestyle. Having a car became the exclusive privilege of party officials. Across the table, Li Anding's colleague Li Tiezheng explained that "people my age loved Russian movies. They gave us the idea we should all own a car, and we all wondered why we couldn't." Li Tiezheng bought his first car a Polish-made Fiat when private ownership was finally permitted in the mid-1990's. But the stigma against ownership was still huge. "The pressure was so great, I couldn't tell anyone. I lied that I had borrowed it." That didn't last long. By 2000, enough regulations had been removed, and enough people were making money, that car ownership became a reality for many Chinese for the first time. Li Anding, born in 1949, the year the Communists came to power, said he was still astonished at the change: "When I started writing about cars, I never expected to see private cars in China in my generation, much less some of the world's fanciest cars, being driven every day." As the men around the table listened to Li's history and added to it, there was a palpable sense of pride. This wasn't simply progress on the level of a convenience analogous, say, to your neighborhood moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. To them it was China finally entering the world stage and participating fully in human progress. It had the additional meaning of something long denied that could finally be acquired, like a wrong being rectified. Over and over again, the group described car ownership with a term I would never have thought to use: "Once China opened up and Chinese people could see the other side of the world and know how people lived there, you could no longer limit the right to buy cars." "This right is something that has been ours all along." "Driving is our right." When Li Lu noticed the sign for the Zhuozhou Service Area of the Jingshi Expressway, Zhu Jihong was on one of his favorite subjects: destinations. He had done self-driving to Mongolia and Manchuria, he said, to Xinjiang and to Xi'an and the Silk Road. He made a round trip to Tibet fantastic! and was considering one to Hong Kong. The main problem with our current itinerary, in his opinion, was that it was too short: "A week isn't long enough to really feel like you've been away." His wife was less and less interested in these odysseys, preferring, lately, to stay home and mind the hotel and restaurant he had bought near his hometown outside Beijing. And his son, oddly enough, wasn't interested in driving at all. Li Lu interrupted Zhu and made sure he noticed this was where we were to pull off and finally meet the group. Though it was early afternoon now and Zhu had been driving for hours, he barely looked tired. I thought to peek at the odometer of his two-month-old Hyundai as he slowed; it showed 7,700 kilometers, or nearly 4,800 miles. That was an annual rate of nearly 30,000 miles, and most of them would be pleasure driving. Though the parking lot was the first time most members of the trip had seen one another, they had been talking for hours: each driver, before today, had stopped by the Beijing Target Auto Club office to pick up a CB radio and rooftop antenna. The rendezvous was on one side of the lot, and in the middle of the group was a vehicle with the biggest antenna of all, a thickly bumpered, sticker-plastered, red-flagged Chinese-made four-by-four belonging to the president of the Target club, Zhao Xiangjie. Zhao and his truck were decked out for safari: he was wearing a khaki utility vest with many zippers, busily meeting members of the group as they arrived. Across the lot, a self-driving group from Guangzhou was similarly mustered, easy to spot by the big stickers with numbers on everyone's side doors and rear windows. And this, it turned out, was Zhao's next duty, to adorn each vehicle with its numbers. My driver, Zhu, accepted his with great ceremony, cleaning his doors first to ensure good adhesion, making sure the number decals were straight and even. If one theme here was safari, another was road rally, the decals suggesting that everyone was part of a speedy team. Though most are organized around the idea of trips, Chinese car clubs come in many flavors. Some are run by dealers (like a Honda dealership in Guangzhou), and others (like the VW Polo Club in Beijing) are nonprofit and organized around a particular model. At least one is the offshoot of an outdoor-recreational-gear manufacturer. Many are just for four-wheel-drive vehicles and aim to go to the back of beyond. Travel agencies sponsor some; others are run for and by motorcyclists. One of Zhao Xiangjie's advantages, at the Beijing Target Auto Club, is good connections in officialdom. He has worked as a composer, filmmaker and official celebration organizer; he knows important people and has succeeded in getting them to steer big commissions his way. His auto-club offices are in the government-run Olympics Center. In a speech he gave to the 2005 Auto Clubs and Fans C.E.O. Forum, I heard him assert that more government involvement was needed if automobile-related industries like the clubs were to develop in an optimal fashion. I sensed that he wouldn't mind being China's first under secretary of car clubs. But an alternate strategy may have more momentum. Back in Beijing, a young man named Chen Ming helps run what appears to be the largest self-driving organization in China: the auto-club arm of Beijing traffic radio FM 103.9. His employees, around 100 of them, occupy a floor and a half of a midsize office building. Chen Ming has high volume and a rapidly growing business. Linking an auto club to traffic radio seems inspired. Members pay $27 a year and receive benefits that include group insurance rates, gasoline rebates, "auto rescue" within Beijing's Fifth Ring Road, free rental cars if a repair takes more than three days, et cetera. Chen got his start in the business as Zhao's prot?g? he was assistant manager of the Beijing Target Auto Club and when I spoke with him in Beijing, he shared his belief that Zhao's approach, his eagerness to stay involved with the government, is outdated. Maybe half of the vehicles in our group were S.U.V.'s and the rest were passenger cars, almost all with foreign labels Toyota, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Citro?n not the cheaper Chinese models that made up the majority of cars on the road, the Fotons, Geelys, Cherys, JAC's. (More than 40 local brands are currently manufactured in China.) One of the foreign cars caught my eye: a flashy white Volvo S80, driven by a man who was also a distinctive dresser. With his white leather loafers, tight jeans, white belt with a big silver buckle and white shirt ("Verdace," read the logo), Fan Li, a television producer, cut an intriguing figure. He was accompanied on this trip by his pretty 24-year-old daughter, Fan Longyin, who was recently back from film school in France. Longyin was quickly becoming friends with Jia Lin, a single female reporter for The Beijing Youth Daily, who was in her 30's. Jia wore a tan leather jacket with a winged glossy-lip logo on the back that said "Flying Kiss." Like me, Jia came without a car, but it looked as if she would start riding with the Fans. And then there was the attractive young family in the white Volkswagen Passat, the Chens: Xiaohong (who uses the name Peter with English speakers), the personable information-technology executive; his wife, Yin Aiqin, an electric power consultant; and their 4-year-old daughter, Yen Yi Yi, whom, I would soon learn, was already taking voice lessons at home from a member of the Beijing Opera. More nerdy but genial were the bespectacled Wangs, in their Citro?n Xsara: she ran part of the back office of Air China; he worked for an international freight firm. They, too, had an unattached passenger who shared the driving and expenses. He was the urbane Zhou Yan, a partner in China's third-largest law firm. And then there were the businessmen. Organized by a cement-plant owner, Li Xingjie, these 10 or 11 guys from the same Beijing suburb, Fangshan, rode in S.U.V.'s and tended to stick to themselves. Some of them owned coal-processing plants, which meant they were rich. Soon all 11 cars were bedecked with numbers and the club logo. Pit stops and snack purchases were completed; the service area looked a bit like one on an American toll road, though there was no landscaping, the simple restaurant was not a fast-food franchise and the convenience store was not as elaborately stocked as in the States. The gas station state-run Sinopec filled Zhu's Hyundai for about $1.85 a gallon, and I paid in cash, gas and tolls being my contribution to expenses. (Sinopec stations only recently began accepting credit cards.) Everyone piled back in their cars, and we hit the road. We would reconvene for dinner. China's first modern expressway, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway, was built in the early 1990's by the Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Y.S. Wu. Wu studied civil engineering at Princeton in the mid-50's, when construction was beginning on the U.S. Interstate Highway System. At the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike was being widened from four lanes to many lanes, and Wu has said it inspired him. (His powerful firm, Hopewell Holdings, is named after a town near Princeton.) Though Wu ran short of money and the ambitious project had to be rescued by the Chinese government, the toll-road model of highway development caught on. Wu's Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway was the beginning of an infrastructure binge that seems to be only picking up steam: the government recently announced a target of 53,000 freeway miles by 2035. (The U.S. Interstate Highway System, 50 years old last week, presently comprises about 46,000 miles of roads.) Some new roads, especially in the less-developed western parts of the nation, are nearly empty: China is encouraging road construction ahead of industrial development and population settlement, assuming those will follow. The goal, of course, is not simply to replicate the boom of coastal areas, where the majority of the country's population now lives. China's larger aim is to consolidate the nation. Its version of Manifest Destiny the "great development of the West" or "Go West" policy begun in January 2000 envisions far-western territories, like Tibet and the fuel-rich province Xinjiang (the name translates as "New Frontier"), fully integrated, ethnically and economically, with the rest of the country. It seems quite likely that, similar to the case with American history, local indigenous cultures stand to lose along the way. What the United States gained (and lost) with the Pony Express, covered wagons and steam trains, China may achieve with roads and automobiles. If highways in China's west are so far awaiting traffic, easterners have the opposite concern. As we headed south from Shijiazhuang toward Zhengzhou, the roads packed with vacationers and truck traffic, Zhu jostled for position with all the other people who were late getting where they were going. His style of driving helped me understand better why China, with 2.6 percent of the world's vehicles, had 21 percent of its road fatalities (in 2002, the most recent year for which figures are available). Of course, there must be many reasons. The large number of new drivers is one; few of today's Chinese drivers grew up driving, and road-safety awareness seems low. Many roads are probably dangerous though not, I would venture to say, the beautiful new expressway we were on. It was like an American Interstate, only sleeker: the guardrails were angular and attractive, not fat and ugly, and in the divider strip there was typically a well-pruned hedge, high enough to protect drivers from the glare of beams from opposing traffic at night. Beyond the guardrails, grassy embankments sloped down to buffer areas carefully planted with a single species of tree, often poplar. The road surface was perfectly smooth, transitions even, signage sparse but clear. Periodically we saw orange-suited workers hand-pruning the center hedge or sweeping the wide shoulder with old handmade brooms. There was never a maintenance truck nearby; wherever they came from, they apparently walked. It was the sweepers I worried about. Officially, there were two lanes of travel in each direction. But each side also had a shoulder, and on this expressway, at least, the shoulder was exactly as wide as the travel lanes. Thus Zhu and others (despite signs asserting that it was forbidden) used the shoulder as the passing lane. Occasionally, of course, a sweeper would loom, or a disabled vehicle, and Zhu would slam on the brakes and veer into the truck lane. Once past the obstacle, he would floor it and swerve back out, brake once again, swerve, honk it was almost like being in a video game, except that video games end or you can walk away. We, on the other hand, had a long way to go. "Li Lu, does Mr. Zhu know that more Chinese die on the road every day than died here during the entire SARS epidemic?" I asked her. She translated. Zhu looked at me and laughed. "I think he didn't understand," she said. We consulted, and soon Li Lu announced from the back seat that we both really wished he would slow down a bit. Zhu looked at me sidelong and then, if anything, speeded up. he next morning Zhu was tired, finally, and asked if I wanted to drive. I hesitated for a moment. I had researched the issue and was fairly certain that foreign tourists were forbidden to drive between cities in China. Most Chinese, however, seem never to have considered the possibility of foreigners behind the wheel, and from the beginning, Zhao asked whether I would be willing to help with the driving. Far be it from me to shirk this responsibility. So I said sure and climbed into the driver's seat. This day's driving was different from the previous day's. As we moved farther from the coast and its expressways, we spent more time on national highways, which generally are two-lane and pass through a lot of towns. Everyone in the club stuck pretty close together, and there was a lot of chatting over the radio. Our leader, Zhao, began by apologizing for yesterday's overlong drive. Even if there hadn't been a highway closure due to fog, slowness due to rain and holiday congestion, it was too long a drive for the first day, and he was sorry. But he was also upbeat and sounded excited about getting to Three Gorges Dam that afternoon. He moderated the CB chat that followed, prompting each car's occupants to take turns introducing themselves. Some told a joke, some sang a song. Fan, in the white Volvo, put on an Elvis Presley CD and held his mike to the speaker, playing "Love Me Tender" in honor of me, Elvis's countryman. As we passed through one village an hour past breakfast, a clamor rose for a pit stop. The men had little trouble finding places to relieve themselves near the edge of town, but women were in more of a bind. China's car culture not to mention consumer culture has not yet reached the countryside, and there was no restaurant nearby, no fast-food joint, no gas station/convenience store. Chen Yin Aiqin, her daughter at her side, knocked tentatively on the door of a farmhouse and was soon welcomed inside and ushered to the latrine out back. Afterward, before their car pulled away, she dashed back to the farmer's door with a small box of chocolate from Beijing. The lack of infrastructure for touring drivers is one reason that these organized self-driving tours are so popular. Besides having planned in advance (through arrangements with local travel agents) where we would stop to eat and sleep every day, Zhao had an expert mechanic in his four-by-four: repair garages were few and far between, and one of the Beijingers' main fears was breaking down far from home, with nobody trustworthy nearby to help. The national roads, while more interesting to drive than the expressways, were also more nerve-racking. There were considerable numbers of people on bicycles, on foot and on small tractors; there were crossroads; and least expected by me, there were many places where I had to swerve toward the middle of the road because of farmers having appropriated a strip of pavement along the edge for drying their grain, usually corn. Sometimes the grain was laid out on blue tarps; other times the drying zone was outlined by rocks or boards; more than once, traffic slowed because of it. I had heard of Chinese farmers sometimes laying their wheat across the road so that passing vehicles would thresh it for them. But there was something aggressive about this appropriation of the highway. The suggestion of rural hostility toward traffic and the number of people using the road for walking put me in mind of the famous "BMW Case," which received a lot of media attention two years before. A rich woman in a BMW, probably traveling on a road like this, was bumped by a farmer transporting his onion cart to market. Enraged, she struck the farmer and then revved her car and drove into the crowd. The peasant's wife was killed, but despite widespread outrage, China's Lizzie Grubman received only a suspended sentence. BMW's seemed to be a sort of class-divide lightning rod. Recently, the number of kidnappings for ransom has shot up in China the government reported 3,863 abductions in 2004, higher than the 3,000 a year reported on average in Colombia, the previous world leader. "In one case," according to The China Daily, "police searching the apartment of kidnappers in Guangdong Province found a list of all BMW owners in the city that appeared to have come from state vehicle registration rolls." I was hoping to needle Zhu a bit, and so I asked him, if he was so rich, why didn't he have a BMW? "Bad value," he said, explaining that while many foreign carmakers had plants in China and produced high-quality cars at a reasonable price, BMW's were all imported, with huge taxes added on. And indeed, this is true: tariffs and taxes add about 50 percent to the price of imported cars, making them high-status items. If you want to be really ostentatious, you do what rich guys like coal-mine operators from Shaanxi Province increasingly do and come into the city to buy a Hummer those cost upward of $200,000. But Zhu thought that was ridiculous. The Volkswagen Passat he kept at home for his wife to drive was made in China, he said, as were growing numbers of other excellent foreign-designed cars, all of them produced under joint ventures with Chinese companies (some state-owned or -controlled), an arrangement the government hoped would encourage the growth of a domestic car industry. "Like my Hyundai," Zhu said proudly, putting his cigarette in his mouth so he could pat the dashboard. "Made in Beijing." Not long after lunch, we started seeing signs for the Three Gorges Dam and accessed the site through tunnels along an expensively built mountainside road. Security was tight, with numerous guard posts, cameras and warning signs, and I was happy to swap seats with Zhu as we pulled into a roadside waiting area just before an official came by to collect every driver's license. A guide boarded our leader's car and, over the radio, began a running commentary. I asked Zhu, between her remarks, what he thought of my driving. "He says you are a good driver, but he has some advice," Li Lu reported. "He says to improve, you must be more brave!" Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest construction projects in history, seemed a fitting first attraction for our trip, evoking superlatives in this land of superlatives. It has cost an estimated $75 billion so far (including corruption and relocation costs); it will require more than a million people to be relocated; it would generate more hydroelectric power than any dam ever had; and it spans the Yangtze, the third-longest river in the world. The reservoir began filling up in 2003 and has six years left to go; it presents a huge military target. Like so much in China, the scale is almost too large to fathom. The 30-odd people in our group parked and then boarded buses that took us up to a visitor center above the dam; we peeked at a model dam indoors and then, like scores of others, scrambled around the viewpoint, taking lots of pictures. Fan turned out to have a serious interest in photography: his daughter posed, posed and posed again as her father assumed an exaggerated wide stance with his heavy Nikon digital camera. Others focused on the astonishing dam, proudly making sure I got a good look, witnesses to a great change who were, themselves, harbingers of a change. Zhu was back at the wheel the next day as we drove from the Three Gorges area to Hongping, a town deep in Hubei Province and the jumping-off point for visits to Shennongjia, the forest reserve where everyone hoped to see a yeti. His Hyundai had a six-CD changer in the dash, and among the titles in it were "The Relax Music of Automobiles," which turned out to be instrumental versions of the love songs of Deng Lijun, the Taiwanese pop singer of the 1970's. What Zhu really loved, however, was the old-time music on "The Red Sun: A Collection of Military Songs, Volume II." He played the CD again and again. The soaring, triumphalist music evoked bygone days, and I expressed surprise that a modern business guy like him loved the old socialist music so much. Zhu responded that it was the music he grew up with. He had worked on a farm, he confirmed. His grandfather became rich, but the Communists took it all away. "Don't you dislike Mao for that?" I asked. He looked at me full on when Li Lu translated the question and then, at 60 miles per hour, turned sideways in his seat to show me the pin on his left lapel. It was a dime-size brass relief bust of the Great Helmsman himself. Steering with his knees, he put his chin to his chest, unpinned it and handed it to me as a gift. "Many people still admire Mao very much," Li Lu explained. "They know he made mistakes, but they also think he did much good. He got rid of the Kuomintang. He brought China together. He is still a very big hero, like a god to some." Fan, the television producer, I had noticed, was also in the worshipful camp. He had the leader's portrait, in Lucite, affixed to the top of the dashboard of his Volvo so that he could not see anything through the windshield without Mao appearing in his peripheral vision. After I asked about that and complimented him on the DVD screens built into the back of the front seats (for rear-seat passengers), Fan invited me into the Volvo for the better part of a morning's drive. Longyin, his daughter, took a seat in the back, along with Jia Lin, the reporter, and offered some background on her father. "My parents both suffered a lot in the Cultural Revolution," she began. Fan interrupted impatiently. "Oh!" Longyin said. "My father is saying: 'There is no such thing as a perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family everything. Now he's gone, but I want to go back to that time, when people shared everything."' But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn't sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn't be able to own new Volvos? "I think now is a necessary period," Fan said, as his daughter translated. "We have to advance." "Capitalism is something we've been waiting to try for a long time," Longyin said, quickly adding: "Personally, I hate the whole Mao thing. I think it's weird. I don't miss the sound of those old days at all." She did miss France, however, and her French boyfriend. She said she hoped to play a part in the growth of the Chinese film industry, perhaps by becoming an actors' agent. And some time in the next two or three months, she hoped to get a driver's license. was pleased to get to Hongping. The mountain hamlet was shrouded in mist, and the air was cool. Steep hillsides covered with deciduous trees rose on either side, and a creek ran through town, reminiscent of Vermont. We arrived at our hotel early in the afternoon, a nice change. It was three stars, clean, basic, but without a restaurant, elevator or easy parking, and soon we were checking out. "Beijingers are very picky," Li Lu told me. They didn't like it, and so Zhao had to find another. The new place seemed only incrementally better to me, but others were satisfied by the change. At dinner, Zhao was back to apologizing profusely for his poor judgment. But the men, anyway, were more interested in getting soused, and the error was soon forgiven. When everyone rolled out of the restaurant, vendors were on the sidewalk, and Fan made us and them laugh with his uncanny shrill imitation of an older woman who had been hawking a melon. Zhou and others had heard there was a "cultural promotion" a show featuring local ethnic talent on the edge of town and proposed we attend en masse. Zhu demurred, asserting that a strip club would be more fun, if only one could be found. We walked there without him, arriving early and securing a row -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060704/c578d995/attachment.html From c_bradshaw at rogers.com Thu Jul 6 10:58:43 2006 From: c_bradshaw at rogers.com (Chris Bradshaw) Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2006 21:58:43 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: nytimes article on cars in china References: Message-ID: <05e401c6a0a1$acc7ec80$23dd3948@slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com> Craig, I took the time to read the article, what turned out to be more of a travelogue. Since the car seems to be more useful for longer trips, rather than for commuting or shopping (thanks to congestion and, I suspect, a shortage of places to park it at destinations), I was surprised that they didn't embrace car-rental or carsharing. I was struck by the reference to sharing: > "Oh!" Longyin said. "My father is saying: 'There is no such thing as a perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family ? everything. Now he's gone, but I want to go back to that time, when people shared everything."' > But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn't sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn't be able to own new Volvos? > "I think now is a necessary period," Fan said, as his daughter translated. "We have to advance." This shows that there is a certain amount of guilt about the ability to afford cars, and the fact that they are privately owned, while so many are still quite poor. I wonder how sustainable this inequitable distribution of wealth is in China. Part of my motivation in promoting car-sharing in Canada is that it might become an alternative to private-car ownership to the parts of the world who are discovering "development" later than the West. I found it interesting that the middle-class man who accommodated the journalist and his interpreter was partly motivated by having his gas and toll expenses covered, plus being able to share the costs (and space) of his hotel rooms. Chris Bradshaw Ottawa From zhusongli at eri.org.cn Thu Jul 6 14:39:02 2006 From: zhusongli at eri.org.cn (Zhu Songli) Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 13:39:02 +0800 Subject: [sustran] Re: nytimes article on cars in china References: <05e401c6a0a1$acc7ec80$23dd3948@slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <008201c6a0be$7d491610$7700a8c0@LocalHost> Hi, I did not have much time to the long article about car in China. But, yes, car sharing is a new concept for most China people, and many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time. Zhu Songli Beijing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Bradshaw" To: "Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport" Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 9:58 AM Subject: [sustran] Re: nytimes article on cars in china Craig, I took the time to read the article, what turned out to be more of a travelogue. Since the car seems to be more useful for longer trips, rather than for commuting or shopping (thanks to congestion and, I suspect, a shortage of places to park it at destinations), I was surprised that they didn't embrace car-rental or carsharing. I was struck by the reference to sharing: > "Oh!" Longyin said. "My father is saying: 'There is no such thing as a perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family ? everything. Now he's gone, but I want to go back to that time, when people shared everything."' > But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn't sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn't be able to own new Volvos? > "I think now is a necessary period," Fan said, as his daughter translated. "We have to advance." This shows that there is a certain amount of guilt about the ability to afford cars, and the fact that they are privately owned, while so many are still quite poor. I wonder how sustainable this inequitable distribution of wealth is in China. Part of my motivation in promoting car-sharing in Canada is that it might become an alternative to private-car ownership to the parts of the world who are discovering "development" later than the West. I found it interesting that the middle-class man who accommodated the journalist and his interpreter was partly motivated by having his gas and toll expenses covered, plus being able to share the costs (and space) of his hotel rooms. Chris Bradshaw Ottawa ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Thu Jul 6 15:44:54 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Eric Britton) Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 08:44:54 +0200 Subject: [sustran] "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time." Message-ID: <005f01c6a0c7$b16f3830$6501a8c0@Home> Dear Zhu, There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has or can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just might be marketable in . . . BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be one of a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our busy minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old hard work. Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. Eric Britton Hi, I did not have much time to the long article about car in China. But, yes, car sharing is a new concept for most China people, and many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time. Zhu Songli Beijing -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060706/8cb97afb/attachment.html From schipper at wri.org Thu Jul 6 20:28:27 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 07:28:27 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time." Message-ID: Not sure I agree about car sharing..in most developing countries getting a driver license is a big hurdle, and car sharing requires that..once cs has stimulated more folks to get licenses and then to taste car ownership, I think it iwll stimulate them to become car owners. There are also basic issues of liabiltiy,theft etc... Not sure how these play out.. but I fear car sharing will accelerate car ownership/use.. >>> "Eric Britton" 07/06/06 2:44 AM >>> Dear Zhu, There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has or can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just might be marketable in . . . BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be one of a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our busy minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old hard work. Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. Eric Britton Hi, I did not have much time to the long article about car in China. But, yes, car sharing is a new concept for most China people, and many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time. Zhu Songli Beijing From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Thu Jul 6 23:05:12 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Eric Britton) Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 16:05:12 +0200 Subject: [sustran] World Transport Policy & Practice Vol. 12, No. 2 now available atwww.wtransport.org Message-ID: <008301c6a105$3434ecf0$6501a8c0@Home> World Transport Policy & Practice Volume 12, Number 2. 2006 Paris and Lancaster, Thursday, July 06, 2006 Subject: WTP&P Vol. 12, No. 2 now available Dear person on the lookout for "original and creative ideas in world transport" (as it says in our sub-heading). World Transport Policy & Practice Volume 12, Number 2, 2006 -- Urban environmental problems: perceptions &realities - is now available on line. If you go to the newly revised www.wtransport.org website, you will be able to have a look at and download this number of the Journal. Just below you have the Contents and short Abstracts of the articles. In the months ahead we shall be working to make WTPP more interactive and to support other initiatives that are in tune with our own ideas and principles. This will only work if our readers join in and we hope that this will happen. Note: Might you kindly do this for us? If you intend to consult this number, it would be much appreciated if you could just hit the return button here. And if you could add a signature line to identify yourself, this would help as well. When we receive your and hopefully other emails we will begin to get a better idea of who is reading this. And should you have any comments or suggestions for us, well you can just pop those into your note. We read our mail. Kind thanks. Eric Britton and John Whitelegg World Transport Policy & Practice http://www.wtransport.org Eco-Logica Ltd. is at http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/ 53 Derwent Road, Lancaster, LA1 3ES. U.K. telephone +44 1524 63175 Skype: johnwhitelegg The New Mobility Agenda: on line at http://www.newmobility.org Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France Tel: +331 4326 1323 Skype: ericbritton Eco-Logica Ltd. New Mobility Agenda World Transport Policy & Practice Volume 12, Number 2. 2006 Contents of Volume 12, Number 2, 2006 Editorial 3 John Whitelegg Abstracts & Keywords 5 Market potential of compressed natural gas cars in the Swiss passenger car sector 6 Gian Carle, Alexander Wokaun, K.W. Axhausen Are highways best run by concessions? The Italian experience 22 Giorgio Ragazzi The effectiveness of policies to address urban environmental problems: 33 Some perceptions and realities Dominic Stead Editorial Board Editor Professor John Whitelegg Stockholm Environment Institute at York, Department of Biology, University of York, P.O. Box 373, York, YO10 5YW, U.K Editorial Board Eric Britton Managing Director, EcoPlan International, The Centre for Technology & Systems Studies, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara, F-75006 Paris, FRANCE Professor John Howe Independent Transport Consultant, Oxford, U.K Mikel Murga Leber Planificacion e Ingenieria, S.A., Apartado 79, 48930- Las Arenas, Bizkaia, SPAIN Paul Tranter School of Physical Environmental & Mathematical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra ACT 2600, AUSTRALIA Publisher Eco-Logica Ltd., 53 Derwent Road, Lancaster, LA1 3ES, U.K Telephone: +44 (0)1524 63175 E-mail: john.whitelegg@phonecoop.coop http://www.eco-logica.co.uk Abstracts______________________________ Market potential of compressed natural gas cars in the Swiss passenger car sector Gian Carle, Alexander Wokaun, K.W.Axhausen The transportation sector generates 26% of total worldwide CO2 emissions (International Energy Agency (2000)). Given rising concerns over fossil fuel consumption and CO2 production by passenger cars, the automotive industry and governments are evaluating strategies for sustainable mobility. The European Communities (2001) believes that there is great promise in the development of a new generation of hybrid electric cars (electric motor coupled with an internal combustion engine), cars fuelled by compressed natural gas and, in the longer term, cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The paper's objective is to describe the specific competitive conditions that will determine the successful market diffusion of natural gas vehicles in Switzerland. Natural gas vehicles may smooth the impact of transport as they are less polluting and may be run on biogas, a renewable fuel. Keywords: Emissions, natural gas vehicles, fuel cells, Switzerland, competition analysis Are highways best run by concessions? The Italian experience Giorgio Ragazzi Highways in Italy were built on a "cost of service" principle, but in 1999 the regulatory system was changed into a "price cap". The new system has failed in its purpose to relate tariffs to productivity or quality improvements, while it has allowed a dramatic increase in concessionaires' profits. The State obtained a large profit from the privatization of Autostrade, by extending its concession for 20 more years. Financing highways through project backing has numerous drawbacks, mainly fragmentation and irrational pricing. Regulation is difficult and inevitably discretional, with a high risk of "capture" of the regulator. Benefits from competition could be better obtained through unbundling. Keywords: Project Financing; Motorways; Regulatory Policies The effectiveness of policies to address urban environmental problems: some perceptions and realities Dominic Stead The growth in transport volume is adding to urban environmental problems and is one of the main reasons for serious concerns about urban environmental quality. A wide variety of policies is available to tackle urban environmental problems associated with transport. This paper examines the effectiveness of various types of policies that are available, looking at public perceptions of effectiveness, empirical measures of effectiveness and the actual implementation of measures. The paper also examines concerns about the urban environment and the relationship between these concerns and perceptions about the effectiveness of measures to tackle environmental problems associated with transport. The paper synthesises information and data from a number of sources and re-analyses data from large-scale European public opinion surveys. Keywords: Perceptions, policy effectiveness, transport, urban environment, public opinion, Eurobarometer, Europe. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060706/46f283c3/attachment.html From edelman at greenidea.info Fri Jul 7 02:41:06 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 19:41:06 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time." In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4077.213.180.39.70.1152207666.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Hi, It seems that carsharing is mostly used - so far - to get people out of their individual cars, which can have a good but limited effect. IF, on the other hand, carsharing is implemented - philosophically and/or via marketing of e.g. "Gotham City Transport Solutions" - it can be an alternative to someone getting their own car. So a better step forward rather than a better step backwards, yeah? BUT BUT BUT as Lee said it COULD stimulate car ownership, so the thing to do is make it bloody difficult to own a car, relatively speaking, with stick and carrot approach, with high taxes for private cars or more reasonable things like no private car access in as many places as possible - if you want to get there you need to use any means but private cars, folks....BUT yeah I dont know this could just get more people into carism so... press release 6.7.2006 GOTHAM CITY commits to carfree future, offers carsharing as mobility solution in interim Gotham City - Mayor Rice and Beans announced today details of the ten-year plan to make Gotham City carfree within the 2nd ringroad. In addition to having the first two ringroads exclusively for BRT and cycle-based transport, she announced a massive carsharing programme. "A carshare car still pollutes with noise and emissions, still kills anyone it touches when it is moving at a normal speed, still takes but more space than any other form of public transport or non-motorised transport, " said Mayor Rice and Beans, " but the city council, after an extensive amount of public discussion and debate, has decided to support a carsharing system integrated into our public transport, and non-motorised transport system, for the next ten years, when GC within the second-ring road will be carfree. "The carsharing system will use the same SmartCard as public transport and bikesharing/storage, and in addition every carshare car will contain two folding bicycles which can be taken on public transport for free etc. The goal here is seamless mobility, but not uncontrolled mobility... - T Dept of Optimistic Speculation, Green Idea Factory > Not sure I agree about car sharing..in most developing countries getting > a driver license is a big hurdle, and car sharing requires that..once cs > has stimulated more folks to get licenses and then to taste car > ownership, I think it iwll stimulate them to become car owners. > There are also basic issues of liabiltiy,theft etc... Not sure how > these play out.. but I fear car sharing will accelerate car > ownership/use.. > >>>> "Eric Britton" 07/06/06 2:44 AM >>> > Dear Zhu, > > > > There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. > > > > My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has > or > can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just > might > be marketable in . . . > > > > BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be > one of > a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all > together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. > > > > Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our > busy > minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old > hard > work. > > > > Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. > > > > Eric Britton > > > > > > Hi, > > > > I did not have much time to the long article about car in China. But, > yes, > car sharing is a new concept for most China people, and many people > misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time. > > > > > > Zhu Songli > > Beijing > > > > > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries > (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus > is on urban transport policy in Asia. > ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From edelman at greenidea.info Fri Jul 7 02:27:43 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 19:27:43 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time." In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3939.213.180.39.70.1152206863.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Hi, It seems that carsharing is mostly used - so far - to get people out of their individual cars, which can have a good but limited effect. IF, on the other hand, carsharing is implemented - philosophically and/or via marketing of e.g. "Gotham City Transport Solutions" - it can be an alternative to someone getting their own car. So a better step forward rather than a better step backwards, if you get my meaning. BUT BUT BUT as Lee said it COULD stimulate car ownership, so the thing to do is make it bloody difficult to own a car, relatively speaking, with stick and carrot approach, with high taxes for private cars. BUT yeah I dont know this could just get more people into carism so... press release 6.7.2006 GOTHAM CITY commits to carfree future, offers carsharing as mobility solution in interim Gotham City - Mayor Rice and Beans announced today details of the ten-year plan to make Gotham City carfree within the 2nd ringroad. In addition to having the first two ringroads exclusively for BRT and cycle-based transport, she announced a massive carsharing programme. "A carshare car still pollutes with noise and emissions, still kills anyone it touches when it is moving at a normal speed, still takes but more space than any other form of public transport or non-motorised transport, " said Mayor Rice and Beans, " but the city council, after an extensive amount of public discussion and debate, has decided to support a carsharing system integrated into our public transport, and non-motorised transport system, for the next ten years, when GC within the second-ring road will be carfree. "The carsharing system will use the same SmartCard as public transport and bikesharing/storage, and in addition every carshare car will contain two folding bicycles which can be taken on public transport for free etc. The goal here is seamless mobility, but not uncontrolled mobility... - T Dept of Optimistic Speculation, Green Idea Factory > Not sure I agree about car sharing..in most developing countries getting > a driver license is a big hurdle, and car sharing requires that..once cs > has stimulated more folks to get licenses and then to taste car > ownership, I think it iwll stimulate them to become car owners. > There are also basic issues of liabiltiy,theft etc... Not sure how > these play out.. but I fear car sharing will accelerate car > ownership/use.. > >>>> "Eric Britton" 07/06/06 2:44 AM >>> > Dear Zhu, > > > > There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. > > > > My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has > or > can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just > might > be marketable in . . . > > > > BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be > one of > a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all > together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. > > > > Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our > busy > minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old > hard > work. > > > > Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. > > > > Eric Britton > > > > > > Hi, > > > > I did not have much time to the long article about car in China. But, > yes, > car sharing is a new concept for most China people, and many people > misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time. > > > > > > Zhu Songli > > Beijing > > > > > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries > (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus > is on urban transport policy in Asia. > ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From schipper at wri.org Fri Jul 7 03:20:01 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:20:01 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time." Message-ID: Problem is that in places where OWNING is expensive (Denmark, effectively 200% tax on new car purchase), or to some extent Shanghai (rationed numbers of new cars, high taxes), driving/car is usually high enough to offest much of the effects of tax. Sweden, with relatively low taxes on cars and significaintly higher ownership than Denmark and slightly higher gasoline prices, has about the same car km/capita as Denmark. The key is to make parking costs, utilization costs ete reflect real costs and use, not just lump it on new car fees. >>> edelman@greenidea.info 07/06/06 1:27 PM >>> Hi, It seems that carsharing is mostly used - so far - to get people out of their individual cars, which can have a good but limited effect. IF, on the other hand, carsharing is implemented - philosophically and/or via marketing of e.g. "Gotham City Transport Solutions" - it can be an alternative to someone getting their own car. So a better step forward rather than a better step backwards, if you get my meaning. BUT BUT BUT as Lee said it COULD stimulate car ownership, so the thing to do is make it bloody difficult to own a car, relatively speaking, with stick and carrot approach, with high taxes for private cars. BUT yeah I dont know this could just get more people into carism so... press release 6.7.2006 GOTHAM CITY commits to carfree future, offers carsharing as mobility solution in interim Gotham City - Mayor Rice and Beans announced today details of the ten-year plan to make Gotham City carfree within the 2nd ringroad. In addition to having the first two ringroads exclusively for BRT and cycle-based transport, she announced a massive carsharing programme. "A carshare car still pollutes with noise and emissions, still kills anyone it touches when it is moving at a normal speed, still takes but more space than any other form of public transport or non-motorised transport, " said Mayor Rice and Beans, " but the city council, after an extensive amount of public discussion and debate, has decided to support a carsharing system integrated into our public transport, and non-motorised transport system, for the next ten years, when GC within the second-ring road will be carfree. "The carsharing system will use the same SmartCard as public transport and bikesharing/storage, and in addition every carshare car will contain two folding bicycles which can be taken on public transport for free etc. The goal here is seamless mobility, but not uncontrolled mobility... - T Dept of Optimistic Speculation, Green Idea Factory > Not sure I agree about car sharing..in most developing countries getting > a driver license is a big hurdle, and car sharing requires that..once cs > has stimulated more folks to get licenses and then to taste car > ownership, I think it iwll stimulate them to become car owners. > There are also basic issues of liabiltiy,theft etc... Not sure how > these play out.. but I fear car sharing will accelerate car > ownership/use.. > >>>> "Eric Britton" 07/06/06 2:44 AM >>> > Dear Zhu, > > > > There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. > > > > My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has > or > can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just > might > be marketable in . . . > > > > BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be > one of > a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all > together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. > > > > Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our > busy > minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old > hard > work. > > > > Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. > > > > Eric Britton > > > > > > Hi, > > > > I did not have much time to the long article about car in China. But, > yes, > car sharing is a new concept for most China people, and many people > misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time. > > > > > > Zhu Songli > > Beijing > > > > > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries > (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus > is on urban transport policy in Asia. > ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From zvi at inro.ca Fri Jul 7 03:19:05 2006 From: zvi at inro.ca (Zvi Leve) Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:19:05 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling. It is not the time." In-Reply-To: <3939.213.180.39.70.1152206863.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> References: <3939.213.180.39.70.1152206863.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Message-ID: <44AD5419.3040902@inro.ca> Making it more expensive to /own/ a car is not necessarily a good incentive! If the cost of acquiring and registering a car are very high relative to the costs of actually using it (for example $100,000 to buy a vehicle, $1000 annual vehicle registration fees and $1/liter for petrol), this will just encourage people to use their cars even more! Once people make the high initial investment of acquiring a vehicle (and they will make that effort if there is not a reasonable alternative) they will be certain to want to get their money's worth.... Owning cars is not necessarily the problem (and in fact owning a new car creates less pollution than owning an older car), it is how we choose to use our cars that causes the problems. It is the variable costs associated with using the vehicle (fuel taxes, tolls, parking fees, etc.) which give more appropriate price signals. Don't forget that China is actively leveraging their auto-industry to 'grow' the national economy, much as the US did before. It worked for the US (and to a certain extent the other industrialized countries as well), so why should China be expected to be any different? From an over-all economic perspective their are very strong incentives to produce as many cars as possible. Zvi Todd Edelman wrote: > BUT BUT BUT as Lee said it COULD stimulate car ownership, so the thing to > do is make it bloody difficult to own a car, relatively speaking, with > stick and carrot approach, with high taxes for private cars. BUT yeah I > dont know this could just get more people into carism so... > > > From zhusongli at eri.org.cn Fri Jul 7 11:06:31 2006 From: zhusongli at eri.org.cn (Zhu Songli) Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 10:06:31 +0800 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling.It is not the time." References: Message-ID: <002901c6a169$f7b24010$7700a8c0@LocalHost> In big cities in China, like Beijing, Shanghai, parents send their children to driving schools as soon as they are 18 year old. Driving becomes a basic skill in urban life. Now summer holiday is coming, driving schools are crowded with young people who just finished their examination. I know that because I am there for my license. Driving schools are profitable nowadays as teenagers go there periodically and older people who had no chance to learn for license when they were young rush there also. I say it is not the time since most car owners are not aware of the negative impact they have brought to environment and society. Policies should be responsible for the phenomenon. No fuel tax and TDM, people always drive as much as they can only if they can afford to car purchasing and oil price. and public transport has not developed well. I am happy as things change a little. On June 5, the Environment Day, it is reported that 200,000 drivers in Beijing gave up driving. Zhu Songli Beijing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Schipper" To: Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 7:28 PM Subject: (????????-????????????????????)[sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling.It is not the time." > Not sure I agree about car sharing..in most developing countries getting > a driver license is a big hurdle, and car sharing requires that..once cs > has stimulated more folks to get licenses and then to taste car > ownership, I think it iwll stimulate them to become car owners. > There are also basic issues of liabiltiy,theft etc... Not sure how > these play out.. but I fear car sharing will accelerate car > ownership/use.. > >>>> "Eric Britton" 07/06/06 2:44 AM >>> > Dear Zhu, > > > > There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. > > > > My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has > or > can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just > might > be marketable in . . . > > > > BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be > one of > a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all > together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. > > > > Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our > busy > minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old > hard > work. > > > > Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. > > > > Eric Britton > > > > > From schipper at wri.org Fri Jul 7 11:09:56 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 22:09:56 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling.It is not the time." Message-ID: Very interesting. how many of them drove again on June 6? >>> zhusongli@eri.org.cn 07/06/06 10:06 PM >>> In big cities in China, like Beijing, Shanghai, parents send their children to driving schools as soon as they are 18 year old. Driving becomes a basic skill in urban life. Now summer holiday is coming, driving schools are crowded with young people who just finished their examination. I know that because I am there for my license. Driving schools are profitable nowadays as teenagers go there periodically and older people who had no chance to learn for license when they were young rush there also. I say it is not the time since most car owners are not aware of the negative impact they have brought to environment and society. Policies should be responsible for the phenomenon. No fuel tax and TDM, people always drive as much as they can only if they can afford to car purchasing and oil price. and public transport has not developed well. I am happy as things change a little. On June 5, the Environment Day, it is reported that 200,000 drivers in Beijing gave up driving. Zhu Songli Beijing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Schipper" To: Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 7:28 PM Subject: (????????-?????????????*??????)[sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling.It is not the time." > Not sure I agree about car sharing..in most developing countries getting > a driver license is a big hurdle, and car sharing requires that..once cs > has stimulated more folks to get licenses and then to taste car > ownership, I think it iwll stimulate them to become car owners. > There are also basic issues of liabiltiy,theft etc... Not sure how > these play out.. but I fear car sharing will accelerate car > ownership/use.. > >>>> "Eric Britton" 07/06/06 2:44 AM >>> > Dear Zhu, > > > > There are situations in which "not the time" is the best time. > > > > My small (and most respectful) way of saying that since carsharing has > or > can have a certain, call it, Yuppie image, it strikes me that it just > might > be marketable in . . . > > > > BTW, carsharing does not save the world or even cities. But it can be > one of > a very large number of percent solutions, which when you put the all > together you just might have a far more sustainable transport systems. > > > > Requires thought (including driving out a lot of old thoughts from our > busy > minds that are probably the most important challenge) and then good old > hard > work. > > > > Bottom line: Carsharing could work in China, but needs a hero. > > > > Eric Britton > > > > > ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From roadnotes at freenet.de Thu Jul 6 19:52:12 2006 From: roadnotes at freenet.de (Robert Bartlett) Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:52:12 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Rickshaws in Bangladesh Message-ID: <44ACEB5C.2080701@freenet.de> I've just produced a photo document on rickshaws in Dhaka, with the WBB Trust. A (free) download is available from http://www.schorrell-analysis.de/Publications/Publications_List/Book_6/book_6.html; alternatively I could try and upload the file to the sustrans discuss site. Robert Bartlett From c_bradshaw at rogers.com Fri Jul 7 12:02:24 2006 From: c_bradshaw at rogers.com (Chris Bradshaw) Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 23:02:24 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling.It is not the time." References: <3939.213.180.39.70.1152206863.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> <44AD5419.3040902@inro.ca> Message-ID: <00b201c6a171$c8f03680$23dd3948@slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com> Carsharing transfers fixed car expenses into variable ones. If car-ownership costs were increased, it would have the effect of becoming a barrier to ownership for people who can't afford the "admission cost," and also increasing the variable costs of carsharing. The course China is on yields to the "my car" orientation, and will create a great deal of transportation inequity in the short run, and will inundate the built (and natural) environment in the long run. The "helping the economy" argument that dictates producing as many cars as possible, could simply allocate those cars to a distribution model that serves as many people as possible. It would also, with proper public support, mean that carsharing will be more practical from the get-go (a shared car located on every block; a full variety of vehicle types), allowing the Chinese to lead, not follow, in personal transportation trends, and ensure they don't "drown" their cities with sprawl and induced "getting-my-money's-worth" driving. There is a basic human yearning to share (which is mankind's oldest "technology," after all), not just in a country emerging from agrarian socialism, but in the West, where there is growing awareness that the car isolates us, not just from the anonymous "fellow man," but from our neighbours, our families, and from ourselves. Again, I repeat: before we throw up our hands and say that we can't deny "developing" peoples the right to emulate our lifestyle, we might consider deomostrating a more thoughtful, sustainable one. Chris Bradshaw Ottawa From zvi at inro.ca Fri Jul 7 23:12:51 2006 From: zvi at inro.ca (Zvi Leve) Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2006 10:12:51 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: "many people misunderstand car sharing and car-pooling.It is not the time." In-Reply-To: <00b201c6a171$c8f03680$23dd3948@slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <3939.213.180.39.70.1152206863.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> <44AD5419.3040902@inro.ca> <00b201c6a171$c8f03680$23dd3948@slnt.phub.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <44AE6BE3.50400@inro.ca> Hi Chris, Chris Bradshaw wrote: > Carsharing transfers fixed car expenses into variable ones. If > car-ownership costs were increased, it would have the effect of becoming a > barrier to ownership for people who can't afford the "admission cost," and > also increasing the variable costs of carsharing. > In order for car-sharing to work, there needs to be a certain level of basic mobility, something which has not yet been achieved in most rapidly growing cities. From my experience, car-sharing is most appropriate for urban dwellers who need a car for the occasional trip out to IKEA. I really couldn't say what most Chinese people need a car for! > The course China is on yields to the "my car" orientation, and will create a > great deal of transportation inequity in the short run, and will inundate > the built (and natural) environment in the long run. > I am certainly not condoning China's car-oriented growth policies! On the other hand, from my limited experience working with Chinese colleagues, I have been rather impressed with their efforts at 'integrated planning' (ie coordinating land-use, basic infrastructure, and road and transit - one thing which is conspicuously absent is parking!). China is growing so fast and in so many different directions now that it is difficult to imagine what their future will look like. I am actually more concerned with other mega-city regions in the developing world which are also applying car-oriented development patterns, but without the same control and coordination as in China. > The "helping the economy" argument that dictates producing as many cars as > possible, could simply allocate those cars to a distribution model that > serves as many people as possible. It would also, with proper public > support, mean that carsharing will be more practical from the get-go (a > shared car located on every block; a full variety of vehicle types), > allowing the Chinese to lead, not follow, in personal transportation trends, > and ensure they don't "drown" their cities with sprawl and induced > "getting-my-money's-worth" driving. > > There is a basic human yearning to share (which is mankind's oldest > "technology," after all), not just in a country emerging from agrarian > socialism, but in the West, where there is growing awareness that the car > isolates us, not just from the anonymous "fellow man," but from our > neighbours, our families, and from ourselves. > I am not sure how strong the desire to 'share' really is - just look at how little children play together! They only share things that no one wants. On the other hand, there does seem to be a very strong desire to acquire things, and this applies everywhere in the world (except maybe North Korea ;-) ): consumer culture has become the driving force in our lives. China is going down the same path as Japan: first specialize in cheap consumer goods; then develop the manufacturing technologies to move up-scale with more value-added products (computers and electronics), eventually developing a large auto-industry (which has spin-offs in many other sectors of the economy). This economic development model has been applied with varying degrees of success throughout Asia. > Again, I repeat: before we throw up our hands and say that we can't deny > "developing" peoples the right to emulate our lifestyle, we might consider > deomostrating a more thoughtful, sustainable one. > All of us in this forum are well aware of the non-sustainability of 'auto-oriented' development patterns, but the short-term success of this method is difficult to challenge. I think that we need to come up with fundamentally different ways of approaching the way that we live together. How can we shift our time-perspective from the near-term ("I want what's best for me and my family") back to a long-term historical perspective ("what legacy do we, as a society, want to leave for our future generations")? Throughout mankind's history we have built things in order to leave a record of our achievements; now we focus all of our efforts on finding more efficient ways of creating disposable products (even our housing) for immediate consumption! Perhaps this is a natural conclusion of the western mono-theistic perspective on history as a story which is unfolding (as opposed to a cyclical view of history where forces are in a perpetual struggle to achieve some sort of 'balance'). Whatever the case, I don't think that the "developed" countries have a particularly good record at proposing sustainable life-styles! Cheers, Zvi From carlos.pardo at sutp.org Wed Jul 12 23:23:17 2006 From: carlos.pardo at sutp.org (Carlos F. Pardo SUTP) Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 09:23:17 -0500 Subject: [sustran] sutp.org website updated Message-ID: <200607121423.k6CENMDm021503@omr4.networksolutionsemail.com> Dear all, As many of you may have noticed, www.sutp.org has undergone a redesign during the last few weeks. We have been analyzing all details that would improve our website, and developed a new version with greater friendliness to users. You will see that we have added the following characteristics: - Improved registration system (with newsletter opt-in, opt-out) - Search engines for website content and links, documents and photos (documents and photos are searched within each section) - Website links per topic (still under construction) - Bibliography per topic (still under construction) - Greater organization of resources - Users may suggest weblinks, rate documents and photos. - Improved events calendar (still under construction) - Improved photo gallery We hope you like it. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send an email OFFLIST to sutp@sutp.org . Best regards, Carlos F. Pardo Coordinador de Proyecto GTZ - Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC) Cl 125bis # 41-28 of 404 Bogot? D.C., Colombia Tel: +57 (1) 215 7812 Fax: +57 (1) 236 2309 Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662 e-mail: carlos.pardo@sutp.org P?gina: www.sutp.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060712/9371912f/attachment.html From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Thu Jul 13 23:28:14 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Administrative User) Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:28:14 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Subject: building a little open video library on Global South Mobility In-Reply-To: <1040F155-30C5-4A57-9B04-6F76922359B8@transcience.freeserve.co.uk> Message-ID: <00b101c6a688$95321bd0$6401a8c0@Home> Dear Sustran Friends, Might any of you be interested in having a look at this modest project in process? It is called "Global South Mobility" and all you need to access it is a broadband connection. It is free, and this is the way in which we introduce it for now. This "Global South Mobility" section of the New Mobility Agenda video collection provides a collection of private views of both the problems (most of which based on the results of the imported car-based, "old mobility" model from the North) and the Global South's search for new and often original and surprising solutions. And as with the other sub-sets here (including till now: Old Mobility, New Mobility, and World Carshare) part of our challenge is not only to seek striking examples of both problems and solutions, but also to lay the whole thing out in a way that makes it easy to navigate, view and learn from. For now this is begin organized as a collegial invitation-only activity during the development or "thinking exercise" stage. Once we have something worthy in hand, we can see what we will do next. Related video library Groups: * New Mobility Agenda - http://www.youtube.com/group/NewMobilityAgenda * World Carshare Consortium - http://www.youtube.com/group/carsha re * Old Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/oldmobility * Global South Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/global south It you would like to have a look and even better share with us your thoughts and eventually some good videos showing both problems and solutions, well that would be terrific. I very much hope that in time this is going to be useful to you. Eric Britton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060713/02a0fc0d/attachment.html From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Sat Jul 15 02:38:37 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Administrative User) Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 19:38:37 +0200 Subject: [sustran] New Resource: Transport the Missing Link? A catalyst for achieving the MDGs Message-ID: <00b701c6a76c$572e5a80$6401a8c0@Home> -----Original Message----- From: Kate Czuczman [mailto:kate.czuczman@ifrtd.org] Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 7:00 PM To: Gender and Transport Subject: [gatnet] New Resource: Transport the Missing Link? A catalyst for achieving the MDGs A new resource has been shared in the resource section of Gender and Transport by Kate Czuczman. Title: Transport the Missing Link? A catalyst for achieving the MDGs Description: Transport, the missing link? A catalyst for achieving the MDGs id21 insights # 63 - July 2006. Institute of Development Studies (IDS). http://www.id21.org/insights/insights63/index.html This edition of the id21 insights series gives an overview of the relationship between rural transport and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Articles include: Editorial overview - By Dr Danang Parikesit & Kate Czuczman Creating Jobs by Emilio Salomon Getting to School by Dr Gina Porter Balancing the Load, gender and mobility by Priyanthi Fernando Transport for Pregnant Women in Ethiopia by Taye Berhanu Halting the March of HIV/AIDs in Africa by Mac Mashiri A Global Network for Rural Transport by Peter Njenga Conflicting Agendas in Colombia by Luz Marina Monsalve Friedman External URL: http://www.id21.org/insights/insights63/index.html You are invited to view this new resource in our workspace, by using this link: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/worldbank/GATNET/index.cfm?op=dsp_resource_details &resource_id=31476&cat_id=6895 If you wish to retrieve this resource via email, you are invited to send an email to the following link: mailto:www4mail@access4.bellanet.org?body=http://www.dgroups.org/groups/worldban k/GATNET/docs/id21insights63%5FTransport%2Epdf?ois=no Note that the above may not appear as a link in some email clients. If it does not, you will have to fill in the following fields by hand: ------- To: www4mail@access4.bellanet.org Subject: Blank Body: http://www.dgroups.org/groups/worldbank/GATNET/docs/id21insights63%5FTransport%2 Epdf?ois=no ------- Dgroups is a joint initiative of Bellanet, DFID, Hivos, ICA, ICCO, IICD, OneWorld, UNAIDS and World Bank. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060714/e3c38cdb/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060714/e3c38cdb/NewRecource_GATNET_Frangais.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060714/e3c38cdb/NewRecource_GATNET_Espaqol.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: footer.txt Type: text/plain Size: 226 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060714/e3c38cdb/footer.txt From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Sat Jul 15 19:16:04 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Eric Britton) Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 12:16:04 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Global South Mobility - open video library in process. For comments and suggestions Message-ID: <003001c6a7f7$b08143a0$6401a8c0@Home> Dear Friends, I would like to invite those of us here at Sustran who have a feel for this sort of thing to have a look at and provide some guiding comments on the nascent collection of a few more than fifty video clips on the topic of, we are calling it, Global South Mobility. As you will see below it is one of three informal video libraries that we have just pulled together on an experimental basis to see if this might in fact be a useful additional tool in our as yet far to limited set of tools and strategies for dealing with the ? we think very special ? problems of mobility, environment and the economy in the cities of the global south. Since I approach this with some trepidation, while at the same time being convinced that something along these lines is very definitely called for, I would like to invite views and suggestions on this topic here. For the purposes of getting the ball rolling, I will start here with a set of bullet points concerning which you may wish to comment. My hope here is that this process of exchange and group consultation will make all this more useful (if indeed it deserves to exist at all, which is maybe something else that you might wish to share your views on.) 1. Global South differentness: Those fifty plus videos ? especially if you view them in the context provided by the other two libraries indicated below ? certainly make it clear that the mobility problems of our cities in the developing world are very very different from the experience of, let?s call it, the Old World ;-). 2. Uses: Despite the fact that these have all been contributed by amateurs, and in most cases visitors (and often very na?ve visitors), to me these views of the city and its traffic have to have considerable usefulness. If only for students and as a stark reminder to anyone who has not lived and tried to get around in places like Quito, Lagos, Saigon, Manila and the long list goes on. And for transport professionals, the media and even those organizations who are trying to do something about these conditions. What is it that they say about the value of a picture . . . ? 3. Organization: Let?s bear in mind that if this is what we managed to find by fishing for a first day around the web for clips that could easily be incorporated here (and mainly via YouTube), and as such should be viewed as a quick first cut. We can do better if we put our heads together on this. Moreover, by creating such an open library, we can make this better known and invite more structured and complete views of what is going on. (And as you are aware there are alternatives to YouTube in this fast developing slice of the web, including www.google.video , http://www.ifilm.com/, http://creative.gettyimages.com/, and others. After having a quick look at the lot, we decided to work with YouTube for at least this first round. You may have other ideas on this, and if so please do let us know.) 4. Content: And if thus far most of what you see here underscores the problems and chaos of traffic in these cities, an important part of this library will in time also be to provide a central place for exposing good ideas, new programs and remedial approaches which are coming out of the Global South. It is my hope that this is going to prove a rich and highly useful reference. The first things we will doubtless see here will be views of some of the new BRT projects which are springing up all over the place. But I am sure that we will see a lot more as we get together to build up this new public resource. 5. Openness: What is it that they say is the best way to destroy a good idea? To organize it? To my mind that is the challenge here. The idea should be not to impose all kinds of structure and attitudes, as invariably happens when something along these lines is carried out by a government organization with a specified mandate and higher-ups to satisfy -- what we want to do here is to create an evocative, attractive, varied and useful framework for people to add to and use for their own purposes. 6. Internal Structure: I am trying to communicate a few thoughts on how we can have a more easily accessible site to the YouTube people. And if you have your own suggestions for them, if you let me know I can try to put them into the pipeline. 7. Bottom line? To my mind I have long been convinced that the two most important differentiating and shaping phenomena in these cities of the South are (a) the massive issues surrounding two/three wheel vehicles, and especially those with motors; and (b) small vehicle, usually entrepreneurial transport (such as colectivos, small buses, share taxis, etc.). Neither really has had a ;place in the transportation curricula of most of our specialized institutions and agencies, and both are treated either in a mainly negative fashion or, more often, not at all (at least from a strategic perspective). 8. Guidelines: Might it be useful for us to get together to assemble some rough guidelines to help those who may wish to prepare their own videos along these lines? Think of it from your personal perspective, If you were to go out on the street to take shots of carry out interviews in an attempt to make your point, might it be helpful for you to have a couple of pages of technical counsel to help you do this better? Let us know and we can see what can be offered. There is more to it than that of course, but I hope that these first thoughts will be of some use and stimulate your comments and suggestions. That after all is why we are here. Eric Britton PS When are we going to see your first video? New Mobility Agenda What you have here is for now what we call a thinking exercise. The idea is to play with the site a bit and see if in good order we can create a useful video library in support of the New Mobility Agenda at http://www.newmobility.org and its associated collaborative programs. My thought was to begin by plugging in a first set of films, and then to What you have here is for now what we call a thinking exercise. The idea is to play with the site a bit and see if in good order we can create a useful video library in support of the New Mobility Agenda at http://www.newmobility.org and its associated collaborative programs. My thought was to begin by plugging in a first set of films, and then to think together about the internal organization of the site so that people will have rapid access to the topic areas of particular interest to them (examples, carsharing, economic instruments, cycle support, public spaces, etc.) And then only when we are confident that this is going to be easy to use and useful, should we take it public. Your reactions? Related New Mobility Video Library Groups: * New Mobility Agenda ? http://www.youtube.com/group/NewMob ilityAgenda * World Carshare Consortium - http://www.youtube.com/group/carsha re * Old Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/oldmob ility * Global South Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/global south ... (more ) (less ) Tags: Sustainable transport, cities, walk, cycle, public space Status: Public Created: July 12, 2006, 08:23 AM Old Mobility (Oops) This is intended to work as a supporting subset of the New Mobility Agenda video library site here and the full NMA program at http://www.newmobility.org. (If you are not sure as to what ?old mobility? means in this context, we can refer you to http://www.ecoplan.org/briefs/general/old-mobility.htm from the New Mobility Advisory/Briefs program This is intended to work as a supporting subset of the New Mobility Agenda video library site here and the full NMA program at http://www.newmobility.org. (If you are not sure as to what ?old mobility? means in this context, we can refer you to http://www.ecoplan.org/briefs/gener al/old-mobility.htm from the New Mobility Advisory/Briefs program at http://www.newmobilityadvisory.org. In the following we are still very much at the play and think stage here. And as with the other sub-sets here (including till now: Old Mobility, New Mobility, and World Carshare) part of our challenge is not only to seek striking examples of both problems and solutions, but also to lay the whole thing out in a way that makes it easy to navigate, view and learn from. For now this is begin organized as a collegial invitation-only activity during the development or ?thinking exercise? stage. Once we have something worthy in hand, we can see what we will do next. Related video library Groups: * New Mobility Agenda ? http://www.youtube.com/group/NewMob ilityAgenda ? World Carshare Consortium - http://www.youtube.com/group/carsha re * Old Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/oldmob ility * Global South Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/global south ... (more ) (less ) Tags: traffic, congestion, accidents, pollution, global warming, Status: Public Created: July 13, 2006, 02:34 AM Global South Mobility This ?Global South Mobility? section of the New Mobility Agenda video collection provides a collection of private views of both the problems (most of which based on the results of the imported car-based, ?old mobility? model from the North) and the Global South?s search for new and often original and surprising solutions. And as with the This ?Global South Mobility? section of the New Mobility Agenda video collection provides a collection of private views of both the problems (most of which based on the results of the imported car-based, ?old mobility? model from the North) and the Global South?s search for new and often original and surprising solutions. And as with the other sub-sets here (including till now: Old Mobility, New Mobility, and World Carshare) part of our challenge is not only to seek striking examples of both problems and solutions, but also to lay the whole thing out in a way that makes it easy to navigate, view and learn from. For now this is begin organized as a private invitation-only activity during the development stage. Once we have something worthy in hand, we can see what we will do next. Related video library Groups: * New Mobility Agenda ? http://www.youtube.com/group/NewMob ilityAgenda * World Carshare Consortium - http://www.youtube.com/group/carsha re * Old Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/oldmob ility * Global South Mobility - http://www.youtube.com/group/global south ... (more ) (less ) Tags: traffic, congestion, accidents, pollution, global warming, Status: Public Created: July 13, 2006, 02:47 AM -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 4307 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060715/ff264e2e/attachment-0002.jpe From edelman at greenidea.info Mon Jul 17 23:13:06 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 16:13:06 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Bangalore's biofuel blend buses In-Reply-To: <003001c6a7f7$b08143a0$6401a8c0@Home> References: <003001c6a7f7$b08143a0$6401a8c0@Home> Message-ID: <2402.213.220.212.252.1153145586.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> from UITP magazine "Public Transport International" http://www.uitp-pti.com/img/cover4_2006/28-30-en.pdf Can people provide some info about pongamia? It SEEMS that it is not competing against food crops, and it is also used more or less straight for fuel... Thanks, T ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Moravsk? 30 CZ-120 00 Praha 2 ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From edelman at greenidea.info Mon Jul 17 23:22:35 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 16:22:35 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... Message-ID: <2412.213.220.212.252.1153146155.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Hi all, This was really great for me until the very last paragraph. - T --- Eco-Economy Update 2006-5 July 13, 2006 SUPERMARKETS AND SERVICE STATIONS NOW COMPETING FOR GRAIN Lester R. Brown Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that world grain use will grow by 20 million tons in 2006. Of this, 14 million tons will be used to produce fuel for cars in the United States, leaving only 6 million tons to satisfy the world�s growing food needs. In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuel is insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year. The grain to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people. Investors are jumping on the highly profitable biofuel-bandwagon so fast that hardly a day goes by without another ethanol distillery or biodiesel refinery being announced somewhere in the world. The amount of corn used in U.S. ethanol distilleries has tripled in five years, jumping from 18 million tons in 2001 to an estimated 55 million tons from the 2006 crop. In some U.S. Corn Belt states, ethanol distilleries are taking over the corn supply. In Iowa, a staggering 55 ethanol plants are operating or have been proposed. Iowa State University economist Bob Wisner observes that if all these plants are built, they would use virtually all the corn grown in Iowa. In South Dakota, a top-ten corn-growing state, ethanol distilleries are already claiming over half of the corn harvest. With so many distilleries being built, livestock and poultry producers fear there may not be enough corn to produce meat, milk, and eggs. And since the United States supplies 70 percent of world corn exports, corn-importing countries are worried about their supply. Since almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for automobiles, including wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and sugarcane, the line between the food and energy economies is disappearing. Historically, food processors and livestock producers that converted these farm commodities into products for supermarket shelves were the only buyers. Now there is another group, those buying for the ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries that supply service stations. As the price of oil climbs, it becomes increasingly profitable to convert farm commodities into automotive fuel, either ethanol or biodiesel. In effect, the price of oil becomes the support price for food commodities. Whenever the food value of a commodity drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel. Crop-based fuel production is now concentrated in Brazil, the United States, and Western Europe. The United States and Brazil each produced over 4 billion gallons (16 billion liters) of ethanol in 2005. While Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock, U.S. distillers use grain�mostly corn. The 55 million tons of U.S. corn going into ethanol this year represent nearly one sixth of the country�s grain harvest but will supply only 3 percent of its automotive fuel. (For additional data, see www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update55_data.htm.) Brazil, the world�s largest sugar producer and exporter, is now converting half of its sugar harvest into fuel ethanol. With just 10 percent of the world�s sugar harvest going into ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled. Cheap sugar may now be history. In Europe the emphasis is on producing biodiesel. Last year the European Union (EU) produced 1.6 billion gallons of biofuels. Of this, 858 million gallons were biodiesel, produced from vegetable oil, mostly in Germany and France, and 718 million gallons were ethanol, most of it distilled from grain in France, Spain, and Germany. Margarine manufacturers, struggling to compete with subsidized biodiesel refineries, have asked the European Parliament for help. In Asia, China and India are both building ethanol distilleries. In 2005, China converted some 2 million tons of grain�mostly corn, but also some wheat and rice�into ethanol. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations and in new biodiesel refineries. Within the last year or so, Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries, but recently has suspended further licensing while it assesses the adequacy of palm oil supplies. The profitability of crop-based fuel production has created an investment juggernaut. With a U.S. ethanol subsidy of 51¢ per gallon in effect until 2010, and with oil priced at $70 per barrel, distilling fuel alcohol from corn promises huge profits for years to come. In May 2005, the 100th U.S. ethanol distillery came on line. Seven of these distilleries are being expanded. Another 34 or so are under construction and scores more are in the planning stages. The soaring demand for crop-based fuel is coming when world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 34 years and when there are 76 million more people to feed each year. The U.S. investment in biofuel production in response to runaway oil prices is spiraling out of control, threatening to draw grain away from the production of beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs. And, most seriously, the vast number of distilleries in operation, under construction, and in the planning stages threatens to reduce grain available for direct human consumption. Simply put, the stage is being set for a head-on collision between the world�s 800 million affluent automobile owners and food consumers. Given the insatiable appetite of cars for fuel, higher grain prices appear inevitable. The only question is when food prices will rise and by how much. Indeed, in recent months, wheat and corn prices have risen by one fifth. For the 2 billion poorest people in the world, many of whom spend half or more of their income on food, rising grain prices can quickly become life threatening. The broader risk is that rising food prices could spread hunger and generate political instability in low-income countries that import grain, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Mexico. This instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress. If ethanol distillery demand for grain continues its explosive growth, driving grain prices to dangerous highs, the U.S. government may have to intervene in the unfolding global conflict over food between affluent motorists and low-income consumers. There are alternatives to using food-based fuels. For example, the equivalent of the 3 percent gain in automotive fuel supplies from ethanol could be achieved several times over�and at a fraction of the cost�simply by raising auto fuel efficiency standards by 20 percent. Investing in public transport could reduce overall dependence on cars. There are other fuel options as well. While there are no alternatives to food for people, there is an alternative source of fuel for cars, one that involves shifting to highly efficient gas-electric hybrid plug-ins. This would enable motorists to do short-distance driving, such as the daily commute, with electricity. If wind-rich countries such as the United States, China, and those in Europe invest heavily in wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, cars could run primarily on wind energy, and at the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 a gallon. # # # Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org or contact jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org For more in-depth information see Chapters 2 and 10 in Plan B 2.0, at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm For reprint permission contact rjk (at) earthpolicy.org ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From SCHIPPER at wri.org Mon Jul 17 23:25:19 2006 From: SCHIPPER at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 10:25:19 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... Message-ID: Don't be too over enthusiastic about plug in hybrids..why make a complicated device even more complicated? >>> edelman@greenidea.info 7/17/2006 10:22 AM >>> Hi all, This was really great for me until the very last paragraph. - T --- Eco-Economy Update 2006-5 July 13, 2006 SUPERMARKETS AND SERVICE STATIONS NOW COMPETING FOR GRAIN Lester R. Brown Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that world grain use will grow by 20 million tons in 2006. Of this, 14 million tons will be used to produce fuel for cars in the United States, leaving only 6 million tons to satisfy the world�s growing food needs. In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuel is insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year. The grain to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people. Investors are jumping on the highly profitable biofuel-bandwagon so fast that hardly a day goes by without another ethanol distillery or biodiesel refinery being announced somewhere in the world. The amount of corn used in U.S. ethanol distilleries has tripled in five years, jumping from 18 million tons in 2001 to an estimated 55 million tons from the 2006 crop. In some U.S. Corn Belt states, ethanol distilleries are taking over the corn supply. In Iowa, a staggering 55 ethanol plants are operating or have been proposed. Iowa State University economist Bob Wisner observes that if all these plants are built, they would use virtually all the corn grown in Iowa. In South Dakota, a top-ten corn-growing state, ethanol distilleries are already claiming over half of the corn harvest. With so many distilleries being built, livestock and poultry producers fear there may not be enough corn to produce meat, milk, and eggs. And since the United States supplies 70 percent of world corn exports, corn-importing countries are worried about their supply. Since almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for automobiles, including wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and sugarcane, the line between the food and energy economies is disappearing. Historically, food processors and livestock producers that converted these farm commodities into products for supermarket shelves were the only buyers. Now there is another group, those buying for the ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries that supply service stations. As the price of oil climbs, it becomes increasingly profitable to convert farm commodities into automotive fuel, either ethanol or biodiesel. In effect, the price of oil becomes the support price for food commodities. Whenever the food value of a commodity drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel. Crop-based fuel production is now concentrated in Brazil, the United States, and Western Europe. The United States and Brazil each produced over 4 billion gallons (16 billion liters) of ethanol in 2005. While Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock, U.S. distillers use grain�mostly corn. The 55 million tons of U.S. corn going into ethanol this year represent nearly one sixth of the country�s grain harvest but will supply only 3 percent of its automotive fuel. (For additional data, see www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update55_data.htm.) Brazil, the world�s largest sugar producer and exporter, is now converting half of its sugar harvest into fuel ethanol. With just 10 percent of the world�s sugar harvest going into ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled. Cheap sugar may now be history. In Europe the emphasis is on producing biodiesel. Last year the European Union (EU) produced 1.6 billion gallons of biofuels. Of this, 858 million gallons were biodiesel, produced from vegetable oil, mostly in Germany and France, and 718 million gallons were ethanol, most of it distilled from grain in France, Spain, and Germany. Margarine manufacturers, struggling to compete with subsidized biodiesel refineries, have asked the European Parliament for help. In Asia, China and India are both building ethanol distilleries. In 2005, China converted some 2 million tons of grain�mostly corn, but also some wheat and rice�into ethanol. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations and in new biodiesel refineries. Within the last year or so, Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries, but recently has suspended further licensing while it assesses the adequacy of palm oil supplies. The profitability of crop-based fuel production has created an investment juggernaut. With a U.S. ethanol subsidy of 51¢ per gallon in effect until 2010, and with oil priced at $70 per barrel, distilling fuel alcohol from corn promises huge profits for years to come. In May 2005, the 100th U.S. ethanol distillery came on line. Seven of these distilleries are being expanded. Another 34 or so are under construction and scores more are in the planning stages. The soaring demand for crop-based fuel is coming when world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 34 years and when there are 76 million more people to feed each year. The U.S. investment in biofuel production in response to runaway oil prices is spiraling out of control, threatening to draw grain away from the production of beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs. And, most seriously, the vast number of distilleries in operation, under construction, and in the planning stages threatens to reduce grain available for direct human consumption. Simply put, the stage is being set for a head-on collision between the world�s 800 million affluent automobile owners and food consumers. Given the insatiable appetite of cars for fuel, higher grain prices appear inevitable. The only question is when food prices will rise and by how much. Indeed, in recent months, wheat and corn prices have risen by one fifth. For the 2 billion poorest people in the world, many of whom spend half or more of their income on food, rising grain prices can quickly become life threatening. The broader risk is that rising food prices could spread hunger and generate political instability in low-income countries that import grain, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Mexico. This instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress. If ethanol distillery demand for grain continues its explosive growth, driving grain prices to dangerous highs, the U.S. government may have to intervene in the unfolding global conflict over food between affluent motorists and low-income consumers. There are alternatives to using food-based fuels. For example, the equivalent of the 3 percent gain in automotive fuel supplies from ethanol could be achieved several times over�and at a fraction of the cost�simply by raising auto fuel efficiency standards by 20 percent. Investing in public transport could reduce overall dependence on cars. There are other fuel options as well. While there are no alternatives to food for people, there is an alternative source of fuel for cars, one that involves shifting to highly efficient gas-electric hybrid plug-ins. This would enable motorists to do short-distance driving, such as the daily commute, with electricity. If wind-rich countries such as the United States, China, and those in Europe invest heavily in wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, cars could run primarily on wind energy, and at the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 a gallon. # # # Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org or contact jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org For more in-depth information see Chapters 2 and 10 in Plan B 2.0, at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm For reprint permission contact rjk (at) earthpolicy.org ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From CeG.CPD at newcastle.ac.uk Tue Jul 18 19:20:35 2006 From: CeG.CPD at newcastle.ac.uk (CeG Professional Development) Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:20:35 +0100 Subject: [sustran] Sustainable Transport Technologies for Developing Environments: an International Conference Message-ID: <6942EE35B530F84EAD432959F5E4DAB5026C9117@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Sustainable Transport Technologies for Developing Environments: an International Conference 5-6 October 2006 School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, UK. This EPSRC-funded Conference will evolve guidelines for application of sustainable technologies as well as strengthen the human resource capabilities in the transport sector through the development of training and research activities in the developing countries. The conference will be of interest to engineers, planners, transport specialists, consultants, administrators and lending agencies in the developing world. Please note that the call for papers is still open http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cegs.cpd/cpd/sustranspapers.php. Information about the conference is available at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cegs.cpd/cpd/sustrans.php We offer an online booking facility at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cegs.cpd/cpd/sustransbook.php If you require any further information or assistance please contact the Professional Development Unit. ~~~#~~~ Professional Development Unit Room 2.19 Drummond Building School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK tel +44 (0)191 222 7439 direct line email ceg.cpd@ncl.ac.uk website http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cegs.cpd/ ~~~#~~~ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060718/07200f2a/attachment.html From CeG.CPD at newcastle.ac.uk Tue Jul 18 19:59:18 2006 From: CeG.CPD at newcastle.ac.uk (CeG Professional Development) Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:59:18 +0100 Subject: [sustran] Newcastle University Professional Development - Advanced Courses in Railways Message-ID: <6942EE35B530F84EAD432959F5E4DAB5026C9118@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Advanced Courses in Railways School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University in association with the Railway Consultancy. Railway Management 16th - 17th October 2006 Railway Economics 30th - 31st October 2006 Railway Planning 13th - 14th November 2006 The courses are designed for those employed in the railway industry, local authorities and consultancies with an interest in the above disciplines - or other railway staff wanting to undertake scheme appraisals, or to widen their knowledge of the railway as a system. For full course details please see http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cpd/railways We offer an on line booking service at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cegs.cpd/cpd/civ838book.php Please contact the Professional Development Unit if you require any further information or assistance ~~~#~~~ Professional Development Unit Room 2.19 Drummond Building School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK tel +44 (0)191 222 7439 direct line email ceg.cpd@ncl.ac.uk website http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cegs.cpd/ ~~~#~~~ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060718/a9fbc757/attachment.html From cvegjl at nus.edu.sg Wed Jul 19 12:38:12 2006 From: cvegjl at nus.edu.sg (Guevarra, Joselito Lomada) Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 11:38:12 +0800 Subject: [sustran] Re: GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7529@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> Incidentally, there was an article that appeared in Scientific American (April 2006) implicitly saying that "plug-in hybrids rule". It claims that plug-in hybrids can run on a mix of 15% gasoline and 85% biofuel such as cellulosic ethanol and could travel up to 500miles on one gallon of gasoline blended with 5gal of ethanol. Well, where are they then?! It was written by Joseph J. Romm and Andrew Frank. Jojo -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+cvegjl=nus.edu.sg@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+cvegjl=nus.edu.sg@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Lee Schipper Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 10:25 PM To: edelman@greenidea.info; sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org; carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com Subject: [sustran] Re: GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... Don't be too over enthusiastic about plug in hybrids..why make a complicated device even more complicated? >>> edelman@greenidea.info 7/17/2006 10:22 AM >>> Hi all, This was really great for me until the very last paragraph. - T --- Eco-Economy Update 2006-5 July 13, 2006 SUPERMARKETS AND SERVICE STATIONS NOW COMPETING FOR GRAIN Lester R. Brown Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that world grain use will grow by 20 million tons in 2006. Of this, 14 million tons will be used to produce fuel for cars in the United States, leaving only 6 million tons to satisfy the world�s growing food needs. In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuel is insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year. The grain to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people. Investors are jumping on the highly profitable biofuel-bandwagon so fast that hardly a day goes by without another ethanol distillery or biodiesel refinery being announced somewhere in the world. The amount of corn used in U.S. ethanol distilleries has tripled in five years, jumping from 18 million tons in 2001 to an estimated 55 million tons from the 2006 crop. In some U.S. Corn Belt states, ethanol distilleries are taking over the corn supply. In Iowa, a staggering 55 ethanol plants are operating or have been proposed. Iowa State University economist Bob Wisner observes that if all these plants are built, they would use virtually all the corn grown in Iowa. In South Dakota, a top-ten corn-growing state, ethanol distilleries are already claiming over half of the corn harvest. With so many distilleries being built, livestock and poultry producers fear there may not be enough corn to produce meat, milk, and eggs. And since the United States supplies 70 percent of world corn exports, corn-importing countries are worried about their supply. Since almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for automobiles, including wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and sugarcane, the line between the food and energy economies is disappearing. Historically, food processors and livestock producers that converted these farm commodities into products for supermarket shelves were the only buyers. Now there is another group, those buying for the ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries that supply service stations. As the price of oil climbs, it becomes increasingly profitable to convert farm commodities into automotive fuel, either ethanol or biodiesel. In effect, the price of oil becomes the support price for food commodities. Whenever the food value of a commodity drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel. Crop-based fuel production is now concentrated in Brazil, the United States, and Western Europe. The United States and Brazil each produced over 4 billion gallons (16 billion liters) of ethanol in 2005. While Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock, U.S. distillers use grain�mostly corn. The 55 million tons of U.S. corn going into ethanol this year represent nearly one sixth of the country�s grain harvest but will supply only 3 percent of its automotive fuel. (For additional data, see www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update55_data.htm.) Brazil, the world�s largest sugar producer and exporter, is now converting half of its sugar harvest into fuel ethanol. With just 10 percent of the world�s sugar harvest going into ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled. Cheap sugar may now be history. In Europe the emphasis is on producing biodiesel. Last year the European Union (EU) produced 1.6 billion gallons of biofuels. Of this, 858 million gallons were biodiesel, produced from vegetable oil, mostly in Germany and France, and 718 million gallons were ethanol, most of it distilled from grain in France, Spain, and Germany. Margarine manufacturers, struggling to compete with subsidized biodiesel refineries, have asked the European Parliament for help. In Asia, China and India are both building ethanol distilleries. In 2005, China converted some 2 million tons of grain�mostly corn, but also some wheat and rice�into ethanol. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations and in new biodiesel refineries. Within the last year or so, Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries, but recently has suspended further licensing while it assesses the adequacy of palm oil supplies. The profitability of crop-based fuel production has created an investment juggernaut. With a U.S. ethanol subsidy of 51¢ per gallon in effect until 2010, and with oil priced at $70 per barrel, distilling fuel alcohol from corn promises huge profits for years to come. In May 2005, the 100th U.S. ethanol distillery came on line. Seven of these distilleries are being expanded. Another 34 or so are under construction and scores more are in the planning stages. The soaring demand for crop-based fuel is coming when world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 34 years and when there are 76 million more people to feed each year. The U.S. investment in biofuel production in response to runaway oil prices is spiraling out of control, threatening to draw grain away from the production of beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs. And, most seriously, the vast number of distilleries in operation, under construction, and in the planning stages threatens to reduce grain available for direct human consumption. Simply put, the stage is being set for a head-on collision between the world�s 800 million affluent automobile owners and food consumers. Given the insatiable appetite of cars for fuel, higher grain prices appear inevitable. The only question is when food prices will rise and by how much. Indeed, in recent months, wheat and corn prices have risen by one fifth. For the 2 billion poorest people in the world, many of whom spend half or more of their income on food, rising grain prices can quickly become life threatening. The broader risk is that rising food prices could spread hunger and generate political instability in low-income countries that import grain, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Mexico. This instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress. If ethanol distillery demand for grain continues its explosive growth, driving grain prices to dangerous highs, the U.S. government may have to intervene in the unfolding global conflict over food between affluent motorists and low-income consumers. There are alternatives to using food-based fuels. For example, the equivalent of the 3 percent gain in automotive fuel supplies from ethanol could be achieved several times over�and at a fraction of the cost�simply by raising auto fuel efficiency standards by 20 percent. Investing in public transport could reduce overall dependence on cars. There are other fuel options as well. While there are no alternatives to food for people, there is an alternative source of fuel for cars, one that involves shifting to highly efficient gas-electric hybrid plug-ins. This would enable motorists to do short-distance driving, such as the daily commute, with electricity. If wind-rich countries such as the United States, China, and those in Europe invest heavily in wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, cars could run primarily on wind energy, and at the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 a gallon. # # # Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org or contact jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org For more in-depth information see Chapters 2 and 10 in Plan B 2.0, at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm For reprint permission contact rjk (at) earthpolicy.org ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From schipper at wri.org Wed Jul 19 21:22:56 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 08:22:56 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... Message-ID: Why do you need a plug in hybrid to get the alleged benefit of the fuel? Lee Schipper Director of Research EMBARQ, the WRI Center for Sustainable Transport Washington DC +1202 729 7735 www.embarq.wri.org >>> cvegjl@nus.edu.sg 07/18/06 11:38 PM >>> Incidentally, there was an article that appeared in Scientific American (April 2006) implicitly saying that "plug-in hybrids rule". It claims that plug-in hybrids can run on a mix of 15% gasoline and 85% biofuel such as cellulosic ethanol and could travel up to 500miles on one gallon of gasoline blended with 5gal of ethanol. Well, where are they then?! It was written by Joseph J. Romm and Andrew Frank. Jojo -----Original Message----- From: sustran-discuss-bounces+cvegjl=nus.edu.sg@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+cvegjl=nus.edu.sg@list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf Of Lee Schipper Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 10:25 PM To: edelman@greenidea.info; sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org; carfree_cities@yahoogroups.com Subject: [sustran] Re: GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... Don't be too over enthusiastic about plug in hybrids..why make a complicated device even more complicated? >>> edelman@greenidea.info 7/17/2006 10:22 AM >>> Hi all, This was really great for me until the very last paragraph. - T --- Eco-Economy Update 2006-5 July 13, 2006 SUPERMARKETS AND SERVICE STATIONS NOW COMPETING FOR GRAIN Lester R. Brown Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that world grain use will grow by 20 million tons in 2006. Of this, 14 million tons will be used to produce fuel for cars in the United States, leaving only 6 million tons to satisfy the world�s growing food needs. In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuel is insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year. The grain to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people. Investors are jumping on the highly profitable biofuel-bandwagon so fast that hardly a day goes by without another ethanol distillery or biodiesel refinery being announced somewhere in the world. The amount of corn used in U.S. ethanol distilleries has tripled in five years, jumping from 18 million tons in 2001 to an estimated 55 million tons from the 2006 crop. In some U.S. Corn Belt states, ethanol distilleries are taking over the corn supply. In Iowa, a staggering 55 ethanol plants are operating or have been proposed. Iowa State University economist Bob Wisner observes that if all these plants are built, they would use virtually all the corn grown in Iowa. In South Dakota, a top-ten corn-growing state, ethanol distilleries are already claiming over half of the corn harvest. With so many distilleries being built, livestock and poultry producers fear there may not be enough corn to produce meat, milk, and eggs. And since the United States supplies 70 percent of world corn exports, corn-importing countries are worried about their supply. Since almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for automobiles, including wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and sugarcane, the line between the food and energy economies is disappearing. Historically, food processors and livestock producers that converted these farm commodities into products for supermarket shelves were the only buyers. Now there is another group, those buying for the ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries that supply service stations. As the price of oil climbs, it becomes increasingly profitable to convert farm commodities into automotive fuel, either ethanol or biodiesel. In effect, the price of oil becomes the support price for food commodities. Whenever the food value of a commodity drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel. Crop-based fuel production is now concentrated in Brazil, the United States, and Western Europe. The United States and Brazil each produced over 4 billion gallons (16 billion liters) of ethanol in 2005. While Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock, U.S. distillers use grain�mostly corn. The 55 million tons of U.S. corn going into ethanol this year represent nearly one sixth of the country�s grain harvest but will supply only 3 percent of its automotive fuel. (For additional data, see www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update55_data.htm.) Brazil, the world�s largest sugar producer and exporter, is now converting half of its sugar harvest into fuel ethanol. With just 10 percent of the world�s sugar harvest going into ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled. Cheap sugar may now be history. In Europe the emphasis is on producing biodiesel. Last year the European Union (EU) produced 1.6 billion gallons of biofuels. Of this, 858 million gallons were biodiesel, produced from vegetable oil, mostly in Germany and France, and 718 million gallons were ethanol, most of it distilled from grain in France, Spain, and Germany. Margarine manufacturers, struggling to compete with subsidized biodiesel refineries, have asked the European Parliament for help. In Asia, China and India are both building ethanol distilleries. In 2005, China converted some 2 million tons of grain�mostly corn, but also some wheat and rice�into ethanol. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations and in new biodiesel refineries. Within the last year or so, Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries, but recently has suspended further licensing while it assesses the adequacy of palm oil supplies. The profitability of crop-based fuel production has created an investment juggernaut. With a U.S. ethanol subsidy of 51¢ per gallon in effect until 2010, and with oil priced at $70 per barrel, distilling fuel alcohol from corn promises huge profits for years to come. In May 2005, the 100th U.S. ethanol distillery came on line. Seven of these distilleries are being expanded. Another 34 or so are under construction and scores more are in the planning stages. The soaring demand for crop-based fuel is coming when world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 34 years and when there are 76 million more people to feed each year. The U.S. investment in biofuel production in response to runaway oil prices is spiraling out of control, threatening to draw grain away from the production of beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs. And, most seriously, the vast number of distilleries in operation, under construction, and in the planning stages threatens to reduce grain available for direct human consumption. Simply put, the stage is being set for a head-on collision between the world�s 800 million affluent automobile owners and food consumers. Given the insatiable appetite of cars for fuel, higher grain prices appear inevitable. The only question is when food prices will rise and by how much. Indeed, in recent months, wheat and corn prices have risen by one fifth. For the 2 billion poorest people in the world, many of whom spend half or more of their income on food, rising grain prices can quickly become life threatening. The broader risk is that rising food prices could spread hunger and generate political instability in low-income countries that import grain, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Mexico. This instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress. If ethanol distillery demand for grain continues its explosive growth, driving grain prices to dangerous highs, the U.S. government may have to intervene in the unfolding global conflict over food between affluent motorists and low-income consumers. There are alternatives to using food-based fuels. For example, the equivalent of the 3 percent gain in automotive fuel supplies from ethanol could be achieved several times over�and at a fraction of the cost�simply by raising auto fuel efficiency standards by 20 percent. Investing in public transport could reduce overall dependence on cars. There are other fuel options as well. While there are no alternatives to food for people, there is an alternative source of fuel for cars, one that involves shifting to highly efficient gas-electric hybrid plug-ins. This would enable motorists to do short-distance driving, such as the daily commute, with electricity. If wind-rich countries such as the United States, China, and those in Europe invest heavily in wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, cars could run primarily on wind energy, and at the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 a gallon. # # # Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org or contact jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org For more in-depth information see Chapters 2 and 10 in Plan B 2.0, at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm For reprint permission contact rjk (at) earthpolicy.org ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From edelman at greenidea.info Wed Jul 19 23:26:08 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:26:08 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Re: GREAT dramatic warning about biofuels, but... In-Reply-To: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7529@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> References: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7529@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> Message-ID: <1065.213.220.212.252.1153319168.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> > Incidentally, there was an article that appeared in Scientific American > (April 2006) implicitly saying that "plug-in hybrids rule". It claims > that plug-in hybrids can run on a mix of 15% gasoline and 85% biofuel > such as cellulosic ethanol and could travel up to 500miles on one gallon > of gasoline blended with 5gal of ethanol. Well, where are they then?! It > was written by Joseph J. Romm and Andrew Frank. IN response to this one and the other... well, I just dont like individually -owned and used cars no matter what they are fueled by. So "plug-in hybrid carshare cars are better than nothing!" T ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From sutp at sutp.org Fri Jul 21 07:55:10 2006 From: sutp at sutp.org (SUTP Sustainable Urban Transport Project) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:55:10 -0500 Subject: [sustran] SUTP update June- July 2006 Message-ID: <00ff01c6ac4f$9182f370$0200a8c0@archibaldo> Sustainable Urban Transport Project (GTZ SUTP) update ? June - July 2006 ? This bimonthly newsletter gives updates on the SUTP resources, website and events related to our topic of interest. For more information or feedback, please contact sutp@sutp.org , or visit our website at www.sutp.org . Note: you have been sent this update because you?ve registered in the SUTP website and/or agreed to be part of the sutp yahoogroup sutp-asia@yahoogroups.com? . Please follow instructions in the group website at www.yahoogroups.com/sutp-asia to unsubscribe. Also, you can now opt-in and opt-out of our newsletter from the registration panel in the new www.sutp.org website. ? *****Project related News***** (for greater detail of these news, please go to www.sutp.org ) ? *NEW SUTP.ORG WEBSITE LOOK AND FUNCTIONALITY As many of you may have noticed, www.sutp.org has undergone a redesign during the last few weeks. We have been analyzing all details that would improve our website, and developed a new version with greater friendliness to users. You will see that we have added the following characteristics: ? - Improved registration system (with newsletter opt-in, opt-out) - Search engines for website content and links, documents and photos (documents and photos are searched within each section) - Website links per topic - Bibliography per topic - Greater organization of resources - Users may suggest weblinks, rate documents and photos. - Improved events calendar - Improved photo gallery Note: since the website is a new development, our team is still working on the full operational capacity of all details. Please send any comments to sutp@sutp.org *GTZ TRAINING COURSES IN SAO PAULO During the CAI LAC conference in Sao Paulo, GTZ will deliver training courses on Public awareness and Bus Rapid Transit Planning, and is coorganizing a four day training course on nonmotorised transport with other parties. All information on the event and training courses is available from www.cleanairnet.org/saopaulo . Details on these courses (with presentations) will be found on www.sutp.org during the first week of august. ? *GTZ PARTICIPATION IN EST POLICY DIALOGUES GTZ co-organized the In-country EST Policy Dialogues and Training Workshops in Viet Nam (22-24 June 2006), along with UNCRD, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE), Ministry of Transport-Viet Nam; also, GTZ coorganized a similar event in Vanvieng, Lao PDR (19-21 June?2006). ? *GTZ PARTICIPATION IN CHINA WORKSHOP GTZ was involved in the development of the EU-China workshop on sustainable transport, developed by the China Academy of Transport Sciences (CATS), Ministry of Communications (MOC) & Directorate-General for Energy and Transport European Commission (EC) during 27-28 May, 2006 in Beijing. Mr. Manfred Breithaupt gave a presentation on Capability Building on Sustainable Urban Transport in Asia. ?The Chinese version of the GTZ Sourcebook was also officially launched. ? *GTZ INVOLVEMENT IN WUHAN WORKSHOP ON SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT GTZ was organizing the Wuhan Workshop on Sustainable Urban Transport, developed during May 9, 2006. GTZ colleagues gave talks on Capacity building and training on Sustainable Urban Transport in Asia, Principles and policy approaches for Sustainable Urban Transport, Non-Motorized Transport and Pedestrianisation and Fiscal Policies for Mobility Management. ? *NEW UPDATE OF MODULE 1C GTZ has updated the sourcebook module 1c by Christopher Zegras, entitled "Private Sector Participation in Urban Transport Infrastructure Provision". You can download a PDF copy (registered users) in www.sutp.org ? *UPDATE OF ALL SPANISH SOURCEBOOK TRANSLATIONS GTZ, with the collaboration of the World Bank, has updated all (to date) 23 Spanish versions of the sourcebook based on the newer English documents. These are now all available from our new website at www.sutp.org . * PUBLIC AWARENESS TRAINING DOCUMENT IN SPANISH The GTZ SUTP project has released the first edition of the Training Course on Public Awareness and Behavior Change, developed by Carlos F. Pardo. This first edition has been produced in Spanish, and the second edition will be launched in August in both Spanish and English. The document is available from the resources section on www.sutp.org ? *TRAFFIC SAFETY DOCUMENT FROM GTZ The German experience gives a striking example of how the trend of rising accident numbers due to increasing motorisation levels (which can be witnessed in many developing countries today) can cost-effectively be reversed in a short time. The key to success lies in the cooperation of different actors. A complete document developed by GTZ for ESCAP is available from www.sutp.org * MONTEVIDEO TRAINING COURSE ON BUS RAPID TRANSIT The GTZ SUTP project, with the help of Mr Jonas Hagen and the support of the Goethe Institut Montevideo and GTZ Uruguay, has delivered a training course on Bus Rapid Transit Planning during May 3-4, 2006. The workshop was conducted by Mr Lloyd Wright and assisted by Carlos F. Pardo. All details of the course are available from www.sutp.org ? ************EVENTS**** ? * Biannual Conference and Exhibit of the Clean Air Initiative for Latin American Cities on Sustainable Transport: Linkages to Mitigate Climate Change and Improve Air Quality The conference will also have three training courses from SUTP on Public Awareness, Bus Rapid Transit and Non motorised transport before, during and after the event. GTZ will also contribute to the conference by moderating sessions and delivering presentations. Date and Venue: July 24th -27th 2006 -- Sao Paulo, Brazil Web site: http://www.cleanairnet.org/lac_en/1415/article-70393.html ? * 11th International Conference on Travel Behaviour Research, Kyoto,Japan The 11th International Conference on Travel Behaviour Research, organized by the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR), will be held at Kyoto University, Japan, in August 2006. This is the first conference in the IATBR series to be held in Asia. Date & Venue: 16th - 20th August, 2006, Kyoto University Clock Tower Centennial Hall, Japan E-mail: iatbr06@term.kuciv.kyoto-u.ac.jp Web site: http://term.kuciv.kyoto-u.ac.jp/iatbr06/ ? * European Transport Conference 2006 The European Transport Conference (ETC) is viewed as the key sector event. It brings together speakers and delegates to form a "who's who" of transport policy and innovation from across Europe. Dates: 18th - 20th September, 2006 Deadline for abstracts submission: 31st January, 2006 Venue: Strasbourg, France Web site: http://abstracts.etcproceedings.org/ ? * 3rd International Symposium NETWORKS for MOBILITY 2006 Date & Venue: 05th-06th October, 2006, Stuttgart. E-mail: fovus@fovus.uni-stuttgart.de Web site: http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/fovus/index_en.htm ? * Segundo Congreso Internacional de Transporte Sustentable The Embarque-led Centro de Transporte Sustentable (CTS) from M?xico will co-organize an event together with GTZ SUTP LAC on October 16-18, 2006, on sustainable Transport. More info will be delivered through this website, or can be seen in http://www.cts-ceiba.org/congreso2/ (Spanish website) ? ? * Better Air Quality 2006 The 5th Better Air Quality (BAQ) workshop will be held in the third week of September in the historic city of Yogyakarta in Central Java, Indonesia. The theme of BAQ 2006 is called a "Celebration of Efforts" to highlight the success stories that Asian countries, cities and communities have achieved over the last years in addressing air pollution while at the same time highlighting the efforts that are still ahead in improving air quality in Asia. A number of GTZ contributions are foreseen in this event, including workshops and training courses. Web site: www.baq2006.org Date: December 13-15 September 2006 ? ? * Velo-city 2007 in Munich The goal of Velo-city 2007 in Munich is to create an international communication platform for decision makers in the economic, political and administrative arena for the successful promotion of bicycle transport in daily and leisure travel. Simultaneously, we want to reach out to the cyclists, the citizens of the City of Munich. Date & Venue: 12th-15th June, 2007, Gastelg Convention Centre. Registration: info@velo-city2007.com Web site: www.velo-city2007.com From cvegjl at nus.edu.sg Fri Jul 21 14:21:37 2006 From: cvegjl at nus.edu.sg (Guevarra, Joselito Lomada) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 13:21:37 +0800 Subject: [sustran] Are bicycles good for the environment? Message-ID: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7532@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> Got this from my mountaineering org where we all love to run and cycle to keep fit...interesting read. Cheers! Jojo _________________________ Everything good for you is bad for the environment Tags: Bicycling , Longevity , Carbon emissions , Global warming , Population , Public health , Transportation In a working paper entitled "The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling ", Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennslyvania reports that shifting people from their cars to bicycles offers almost no benefit to the environment. We'll dig into this paradox in just a second, but first a little background. Ulrich is the man behind TerraPass , the Wharton professor who challenged his students to bulid a viable business around consumer carbon offsets. Ulrich is also an avid cyclist himself and creator of a number of human-powered personal transportation products, including the Xootr Scooter and Xootr Swift folding bicycle. Bicycles do have large first-order environmental benefits over cars as a means of transportation. Ulrich's analysis considers the case in which a formerly sedentary person begins bicycling 10 km per day, 5 days per week. In this scenario, about one ton of CO2 is spared every year in the form of reduced fuel consumption. This reduction in fuel use is partially offset by the increased food consumption of a cyclist. Although typically we think of food as carbon neutral - because the plants at the bottom of our food chain regrow after we harvest them - this view overlooks the fact that most of us don't feed ourselves by hunting and gathering. The energy required to grow, harvest, process, package, and transport food to your nearest Whole Foods significantly outweighs the actual caloric content of your meal, by a factor of almost six. In other words, only about 15% of the energy we consume when we eat is actually in our food. The rest is contained in the fossil fuels used to bring our food to us. But increased food consumption is a relatively minor effect when compared to the overall gas savings of cycling over driving. The real culprit in Ulrich's analysis is the increased lifespan of people who ride bikes. Regular exercise helps you live longer, which points to an unsettling fact. One of the single best things you can do for the planet is to limit your time here. Population is one of the primary drivers of energy consumption. And there are only two ways to increase the rate of global population growth: bump up the birth rate, or bump down the death rate. In effect, cycling does the latter. (If we look at the population of individual countries rather than the entire planet, immigration is a third way to affect population growth. We've previously discussed some of the energy implications of immigration .) Ulrich estimates that every year of sustained bicycle use adds about 10.6 days to the average person's lifespan, even accounting for the increased accident risk that cyclists face. The result, in Ulrich's analysis, is basically a wash. Each of us, simply by participating in the economy, uses a significant amount of energy. Bicycling rather than driving causes a large first-order decrease in the amount of energy a person uses, but the increased longevity of that person almost entirely negates the savings. Interesting. But how well does theory map to reality? Personally, I have strong doubts about the practical implications of this analysis. The first issue is that most people who opt to cycle rather than drive cars are likely to be fairly fit already. These cyclists will see less health benefits on the margin than the hypothetical sedentary person, and therefore the first order CO2 reductions will dominate. The second issue is subtler but possibly far more important. In Ulrich's analysis, the population effects of cycling occur immediately (which is mathematically accurate in his hypothetical example). But I strongly suspect that the actual demographics of bicycle usage mean that the population bump from improved fitness won't be seen for a number of years. In effect, riding a bicycle shifts energy consumption from today to an unspecified point in the future. In private communication, Ulrich ballparks the delay in the population bump as maybe ten years, which he points out is an insignificant amount of time when compared to the climactic changes that are already underway. True enough, but ten years could be long enough for highly significant changes to occur in the energy intensity of our lifestyles. If, for example, in ten years all of our electricity is produced by wind (yea!) or coal (boo!), shifting our consumption into the future will have real consequences for our rate of carbon emissions. My advice: keep cycling, certainly for your health, and for the environment too. Update: Ulrich's paper got picked up in Andrew Leonard's How the World Works column in Salon. Fun read, although Leonard's main complaint seems to be that he doesn't really like the conclusion of the paper. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060721/62fc1fd4/attachment.html From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Fri Jul 21 15:16:19 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Eric Britton) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:16:19 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Time for a change? Message-ID: <003701c6ac8d$30e63fc0$6501a8c0@Home> Dear Friends, Even great ideas need to be rethought and renewed from time to time. Since 1994, this program has been called World Car Free Days and has sat here at http://worldcarfreeday.com seating away and trying to do its part in getting its message across. And what is that message? Well not so much Car Free Days per se, but rather, as we put it in the opening lines of this fine caf?: ?Not quite zero cars (in most places) but, let us say, a lot less cars, a more tranquil environment, and a lot more safe and happy people.? So here is my question to you and I would very much like to have your counsel. Is it now time to change our name to: ?The Less Cars in Cities Open Collaborative?? Or something along those lines? Now this is not by any means to suggest that I am running away from the idea of organizing your own Car Free Day. Heaven forbid! as my dear grandmother would have put it. A Car Free Day got right can be a wonderful instrument for mobilizing opinion, building local consistencies for change, for fewer cars and for better and softer (and more efficient) cities. But it is only one of the instruments that we need to be considering. I probably should add by way of further background in the case you are not aware of it, we also have a collaborative program, the New Mobility Agenda (at http://www.newmobility.org ), but the focus of the agenda is much wider than ?less cars? strategies and events. Still, you can see how they relate. But that said, I also think that there is a place here for a more focused (and maybe at times a bit wilder) program. Thanks for letting me know what you think we should if anything do with this. In the meantime, what about checking into the Eric Britton PS. By the way and for the record and just to be sure, this is not (exactly) an anti-car forum. There are plenty of them around ? check http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff &ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enFR177&q=anti-car for a list of more than 300,000. What you have here a 'lots less cars in cities? forum which is, as you will see, a very different animal indeed. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060721/fe5f56d6/attachment.html From papon at inrets.fr Fri Jul 21 16:32:34 2006 From: papon at inrets.fr (Francis Papon) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:32:34 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? In-Reply-To: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7532@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> References: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7532@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> Message-ID: <382b8f6073ead9db1ab251f4d3d67eef@inrets.fr> Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear proliferation is a blessing. But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? Le 21 juil. 06, ? 07:21, Guevarra, Joselito Lomada a ?crit : > Got this from my mountaineering org where we all love to run and cycle > to keep fit?interesting read. Cheers! > > Jojo > > _________________________ > > Everything good for you is bad for the environment > > > Tags: Bicycling, Longevity, Carbon emissions, Global warming, > Population, Public health, Transportation > > In a working paper entitled ?The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling?, > Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennslyvania reports that shifting > people from their cars to bicycles offers almost no benefit to the > environment. > > We?ll dig into this paradox in just a second, but first a little > background. Ulrich is the man behind TerraPass, the Wharton professor > who challenged his students to bulid a viable business around consumer > carbon offsets. Ulrich is also an avid cyclist himself and creator of > a number of human-powered personal transportation products, including > the Xootr Scooter and Xootr Swift folding bicycle. > > Bicycles do have large first-order environmental benefits over cars as > a means of transportation. Ulrich?s analysis considers the case in > which a formerly sedentary person begins bicycling 10 km per day, 5 > days per week. In this scenario, about one ton of CO2 is spared every > year in the form of reduced fuel consumption. > > This reduction in fuel use is partially offset by the increased food > consumption of a cyclist. Although typically we think of food as > carbon neutral ? because the plants at the bottom of our food chain > regrow after we harvest them ? this view overlooks the fact that most > of us don?t feed ourselves by hunting and gathering. The energy > required to grow, harvest, process, package, and transport food to > your nearest Whole Foods significantly outweighs the actual caloric > content of your meal, by a factor of almost six. In other words, only > about 15% of the energy we consume when we eat is actually in our > food. The rest is contained in the fossil fuels used to bring our food > to us. > > But increased food consumption is a relatively minor effect when > compared to the overall gas savings of cycling over driving. The real > culprit in Ulrich?s analysis is the increased lifespan of people who > ride bikes. Regular exercise helps you live longer, which points to an > unsettling fact. One of the single best things you can do for the > planet is to limit your time here. > > Population is one of the primary drivers of energy consumption. And > there are only two ways to increase the rate of global population > growth: bump up the birth rate, or bump down the death rate. In > effect, cycling does the latter. (If we look at the population of > individual countries rather than the entire planet, immigration is a > third way to affect population growth. We?ve previously discussed some > of the energy implications of immigration.) > > Ulrich estimates that every year of sustained bicycle use adds about > 10.6 days to the average person?s lifespan, even accounting for the > increased accident risk that cyclists face. > > The result, in Ulrich?s analysis, is basically a wash. Each of us, > simply by participating in the economy, uses a significant amount of > energy. Bicycling rather than driving causes a large first-order > decrease in the amount of energy a person uses, but the increased > longevity of that person almost entirely negates the savings. > > Interesting. But how well does theory map to reality? Personally, I > have strong doubts about the practical implications of this analysis. > The first issue is that most people who opt to cycle rather than drive > cars are likely to be fairly fit already. These cyclists will see less > health benefits on the margin than the hypothetical sedentary person, > and therefore the first order CO2 reductions will dominate. > > The second issue is subtler but possibly far more important. In > Ulrich?s analysis, the population effects of cycling occur immediately > (which is mathematically accurate in his hypothetical example). But I > strongly suspect that the actual demographics of bicycle usage mean > that the population bump from improved fitness won?t be seen for a > number of years. In effect, riding a bicycle shifts energy consumption > from today to an unspecified point in the future. > > In private communication, Ulrich ballparks the delay in the population > bump as maybe ten years, which he points out is an insignificant > amount of time when compared to the climactic changes that are already > underway. True enough, but ten years could be long enough for highly > significant changes to occur in the energy intensity of our > lifestyles. If, for example, in ten years all of our electricity is > produced by wind (yea!) or coal (boo!), shifting our consumption into > the future will have real consequences for our rate of carbon > emissions. > > My advice: keep cycling, certainly for your health, and for the > environment too. > > Update: Ulrich?s paper got picked up in Andrew Leonard?s How the World > Works column in Salon. Fun read, although Leonard?s main complaint > seems to be that he doesn?t really like the conclusion of the paper. > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing > countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, > the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. Francis Papon, mailto:papon@inrets.fr, tel +33 (0)1 4740 7270, ICPC,INRETS/DEST/EEM/HEGEL-PMG, Researcher at the Department of Transport Economics and Sociology at the French National Institute for Transport and Safety Research INRETS, 2, avenue du General Malleret-Joinville, 94114 Arcueil Cedex, France http://www.inrets.fr/transv/pfi/pmg/index.htm -------------- next part -------------- Skipped content of type text/enriched From schipper at wri.org Fri Jul 21 19:26:33 2006 From: schipper at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 06:26:33 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Message-ID: I think hte basic flaw in his analysis is identifying each extra day of life with the per capita energy use of an average American (or other person). At the margin your "extra" energy is much smaller. And a day of life is certainly worth a few megajoules, no? Lee Schipper Director of Research EMBARQ, the WRI Center for Sustainable Transport Washington DC +1202 729 7735 www.embarq.wri.org >>> papon@inrets.fr 07/21/06 3:32 AM >>> Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear proliferation is a blessing. But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? Le 21 juil. 06, * 07:21, Guevarra, Joselito Lomada a *crit : > Got this from my mountaineering org where we all love to run and cycle > to keep fit?interesting read. Cheers! > > Jojo > > _________________________ > > Everything good for you is bad for the environment > > > Tags: Bicycling, Longevity, Carbon emissions, Global warming, > Population, Public health, Transportation > > In a working paper entitled ?The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling?, > Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennslyvania reports that shifting > people from their cars to bicycles offers almost no benefit to the > environment. > > We?ll dig into this paradox in just a second, but first a little > background. Ulrich is the man behind TerraPass, the Wharton professor > who challenged his students to bulid a viable business around consumer > carbon offsets. Ulrich is also an avid cyclist himself and creator of > a number of human-powered personal transportation products, including > the Xootr Scooter and Xootr Swift folding bicycle. > > Bicycles do have large first-order environmental benefits over cars as > a means of transportation. Ulrich?s analysis considers the case in > which a formerly sedentary person begins bicycling 10 km per day, 5 > days per week. In this scenario, about one ton of CO2 is spared every > year in the form of reduced fuel consumption. > > This reduction in fuel use is partially offset by the increased food > consumption of a cyclist. Although typically we think of food as > carbon neutral ? because the plants at the bottom of our food chain > regrow after we harvest them ? this view overlooks the fact that most > of us don?t feed ourselves by hunting and gathering. The energy > required to grow, harvest, process, package, and transport food to > your nearest Whole Foods significantly outweighs the actual caloric > content of your meal, by a factor of almost six. In other words, only > about 15% of the energy we consume when we eat is actually in our > food. The rest is contained in the fossil fuels used to bring our food > to us. > > But increased food consumption is a relatively minor effect when > compared to the overall gas savings of cycling over driving. The real > culprit in Ulrich?s analysis is the increased lifespan of people who > ride bikes. Regular exercise helps you live longer, which points to an > unsettling fact. One of the single best things you can do for the > planet is to limit your time here. > > Population is one of the primary drivers of energy consumption. And > there are only two ways to increase the rate of global population > growth: bump up the birth rate, or bump down the death rate. In > effect, cycling does the latter. (If we look at the population of > individual countries rather than the entire planet, immigration is a > third way to affect population growth. We?ve previously discussed some > of the energy implications of immigration.) > > Ulrich estimates that every year of sustained bicycle use adds about > 10.6 days to the average person?s lifespan, even accounting for the > increased accident risk that cyclists face. > > The result, in Ulrich?s analysis, is basically a wash. Each of us, > simply by participating in the economy, uses a significant amount of > energy. Bicycling rather than driving causes a large first-order > decrease in the amount of energy a person uses, but the increased > longevity of that person almost entirely negates the savings. > > Interesting. But how well does theory map to reality? Personally, I > have strong doubts about the practical implications of this analysis. > The first issue is that most people who opt to cycle rather than drive > cars are likely to be fairly fit already. These cyclists will see less > health benefits on the margin than the hypothetical sedentary person, > and therefore the first order CO2 reductions will dominate. > > The second issue is subtler but possibly far more important. In > Ulrich?s analysis, the population effects of cycling occur immediately > (which is mathematically accurate in his hypothetical example). But I > strongly suspect that the actual demographics of bicycle usage mean > that the population bump from improved fitness won?t be seen for a > number of years. In effect, riding a bicycle shifts energy consumption > from today to an unspecified point in the future. > > In private communication, Ulrich ballparks the delay in the population > bump as maybe ten years, which he points out is an insignificant > amount of time when compared to the climactic changes that are already > underway. True enough, but ten years could be long enough for highly > significant changes to occur in the energy intensity of our > lifestyles. If, for example, in ten years all of our electricity is > produced by wind (yea!) or coal (boo!), shifting our consumption into > the future will have real consequences for our rate of carbon > emissions. > > My advice: keep cycling, certainly for your health, and for the > environment too. > > Update: Ulrich?s paper got picked up in Andrew Leonard?s How the World > Works column in Salon. Fun read, although Leonard?s main complaint > seems to be that he doesn?t really like the conclusion of the paper. > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing > countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, > the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. Francis Papon, mailto:papon@inrets.fr, tel +33 (0)1 4740 7270, ICPC,INRETS/DEST/EEM/HEGEL-PMG, Researcher at the Department of Transport Economics and Sociology at the French National Institute for Transport and Safety Research INRETS, 2, avenue du General Malleret-Joinville, 94114 Arcueil Cedex, France http://www.inrets.fr/transv/pfi/pmg/index.htm From sksunny at gmail.com Fri Jul 21 19:30:10 2006 From: sksunny at gmail.com (Sunny) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:30:10 +0700 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? In-Reply-To: <382b8f6073ead9db1ab251f4d3d67eef@inrets.fr> References: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7532@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> <382b8f6073ead9db1ab251f4d3d67eef@inrets.fr> Message-ID: <44C0ACB2.5050902@gmail.com> Nice article but many things to think of...just becoz cyclists live longer and eat more is cycling bad?...something to think of....how about thinking of sustainable consumption rather....If the developed countries consumed in a sustainable way then the world would have been a different place. Though India is 2nd most populated country in the world but how much energy does India consume compared to the developed counterparts? Increasing demand of energy in India or China is for the industrial activities which feed the developed countries. Self Sufficiency is the buzz word I guess. When India cannot feed its own people why are we planning to meet the needs of others (Only my govt. shud know). KEEP BIKING FOLKS!!! Sunny (I hope we wont end in a future where killing human is the only sustainable alternative for living???? may be or maybe not) Francis Papon wrote: > Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, > investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear > proliferation is a blessing. > > But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is > it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow > a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic > way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human > species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or > to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? From carlos.pardo at sutp.org Fri Jul 21 22:04:26 2006 From: carlos.pardo at sutp.org (Carlos F. Pardo SUTP) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:04:26 -0500 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? In-Reply-To: <44C0ACB2.5050902@gmail.com> Message-ID: <007a01c6acc6$324606f0$0200a8c0@archibaldo> Nobody who is a real cyclist will eat like a pig, or spend more resources than he or she should (I hope). I guess the author of the study thinks that everyone eats the same and the increase of hunger will increase the amount of food they eat. I would expect that from a couch potato. Or do they eat little? Of course, they die earlier. I know! Let's ride a bicycle to death! I almost got hit by a car half an hour ago coming back from my morning ride. I guess that is the most sustainable way to live... or die. Carlos F. Pardo Coordinador de Proyecto GTZ - Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC) Cl 125bis # 41-28 of 404 Bogot? D.C., Colombia Tel: ?+57 (1) 215 7812 Fax: +57 (1) 236 2309 Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662 e-mail: carlos.pardo@sutp.org P?gina: www.sutp.org -----Mensaje original----- De: sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org] En nombre de Sunny Enviado el: Viernes, 21 de Julio de 2006 05:30 a.m. Para: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Asunto: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Nice article but many things to think of...just becoz cyclists live longer and eat more is cycling bad?...something to think of....how about thinking of sustainable consumption rather....If the developed countries consumed in a sustainable way then the world would have been a different place. Though India is 2nd most populated country in the world but how much energy does India consume compared to the developed counterparts? Increasing demand of energy in India or China is for the industrial activities which feed the developed countries. Self Sufficiency is the buzz word I guess. When India cannot feed its own people why are we planning to meet the needs of others (Only my govt. shud know). KEEP BIKING FOLKS!!! Sunny (I hope we wont end in a future where killing human is the only sustainable alternative for living???? may be or maybe not) Francis Papon wrote: > Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, > investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear > proliferation is a blessing. > > But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is > it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow > a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic > way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human > species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or > to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From zvi.leve at gmail.com Fri Jul 21 23:33:24 2006 From: zvi.leve at gmail.com (Zvi Leve) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:33:24 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Message-ID: The Economist made a similarly perverse argument about smoking: instead of banning cigarettes, we should be thanking smokers! Cigarettes are one of the most heavily taxed luxury goods, and the health costs to smokers typically start to appear as smokers approach retirement age. Thus, smokers pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes during their working lives, yet due to their decreased life expectency will receive a relatively smaller amount in social insurance pay-outs. Personally I think that we should be celebrating life, rather than worshiping death - the world has enough suicide bombers already. I agree that any definition of sustainability should try to account for the net energy balance of our activities, but this is certainly not an exact science! Presumably followers of the sedentary lifestyle are more likely to buy their food (and other products) by driving to a big-box store where everything is shipped/flown in from great distances. A bicyclist on the other hand would be more likely to frequent smaller shops which tend to have a correspondingly smaller distribution network. Who can say which one is more likely to consume locally grown products? Interesting argument nonetheless! Zvi -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060721/5673ec3c/attachment.html From SCHIPPER at wri.org Sat Jul 22 01:37:46 2006 From: SCHIPPER at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:37:46 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Message-ID: Careful, the key to his thesis is that the extra length of life cyclists or others who esercise get translates into extra CO2 consumption, using the US per capita CO2 consumption as a way of estimating that difference. >>> carlos.pardo@sutp.org 7/21/2006 9:04 AM >>> Nobody who is a real cyclist will eat like a pig, or spend more resources than he or she should (I hope). I guess the author of the study thinks that everyone eats the same and the increase of hunger will increase the amount of food they eat. I would expect that from a couch potato. Or do they eat little? Of course, they die earlier. I know! Let's ride a bicycle to death! I almost got hit by a car half an hour ago coming back from my morning ride. I guess that is the most sustainable way to live... or die. Carlos F. Pardo Coordinador de Proyecto GTZ - Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC) Cl 125bis # 41-28 of 404 Bogot? D.C., Colombia Tel: +57 (1) 215 7812 Fax: +57 (1) 236 2309 Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662 e-mail: carlos.pardo@sutp.org P?gina: www.sutp.org -----Mensaje original----- De: sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org] En nombre de Sunny Enviado el: Viernes, 21 de Julio de 2006 05:30 a.m. Para: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport Asunto: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Nice article but many things to think of...just becoz cyclists live longer and eat more is cycling bad?...something to think of....how about thinking of sustainable consumption rather....If the developed countries consumed in a sustainable way then the world would have been a different place. Though India is 2nd most populated country in the world but how much energy does India consume compared to the developed counterparts? Increasing demand of energy in India or China is for the industrial activities which feed the developed countries. Self Sufficiency is the buzz word I guess. When India cannot feed its own people why are we planning to meet the needs of others (Only my govt. shud know). KEEP BIKING FOLKS!!! Sunny (I hope we wont end in a future where killing human is the only sustainable alternative for living???? may be or maybe not) Francis Papon wrote: > Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, > investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear > proliferation is a blessing. > > But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is > it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow > a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic > way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human > species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or > to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From sujit at vsnl.com Sat Jul 22 03:06:36 2006 From: sujit at vsnl.com (Sujit Patwardhan) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:36:36 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Re: Time for a change? In-Reply-To: <003701c6ac8d$30e63fc0$6501a8c0@Home> References: <003701c6ac8d$30e63fc0$6501a8c0@Home> Message-ID: <4cfd20aa0607211106t261b7edcya9decf12d1a66120@mail.gmail.com> 21 July 2006 Dear Eric, I'm sure the response will vary according to where one's coming from and also according to one's make up. I've always felt that we are far too defensive when called "extremists". The way cities in the third world are being taken over by "car culture" I feel it is necessary to stand up and say "Hey is this what we want?" This invariably prompts those who follow the conventional path to say - environmentalists are "anti progress" or "anti-development". Instead of trying to skirt the issue by saying "we are not anti development" and trying to explain how a healthy environment is the foundation for sustainable development, it is sometimes better to go on the offensive and give examples of destructive development which is at the root of environmental disasters like the Tsunami, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gasses, depleting forest cover for the earth, pollution and its impact on human health and long term economic growth, are all examples which prove that environmental sustainability is not an abstract term but something real that can be controlled and changed by a shift in our behaviour. But this shift cannot come about by paying lip service to good practices. So in this case I see nothing wrong in saying clearly and firmly that we have been going along a path that has no future and there is urgent need to recognize this before we can take corrective action. It's time to ask if the automobile and auto oriented development can sustain itself in tomorrows world of depleting resources, increasing pollution, increasing inequity and social strife and if options exist to make a sensible choice in favour of a more sensible alternative. If that means proposing "Carfree Cities" as one of the options to consider, one shouldn't shy away from saying it. Of course this is not the same as saying "Ban the Car" but one can and should invite people to consider the option, to ask if tomorrows cities can make space for "life without a car" possible. I could go on but I think I've said enough for a start. -- Sujit Parisar/PTTF Pune India On 7/21/06, Eric Britton wrote: > > Dear Friends, > > > > Even great ideas need to be rethought and renewed from time to time. > > > > Since 1994, this program has been called World Car Free Days and has sat > here at http://worldcarfreeday.com seating away and trying to do its part > in getting its message across. And what is that message? Well not so much > Car Free Days per se, but rather, as we put it in the opening lines of this > fine caf?: "*Not quite zero cars (in most places) but, let us say, a lot > less cars, a more tranquil environment, and a lot more safe and happy > people."* > > * * > > So here is my question to you and I would very much like to have your > counsel. > > > > Is it now time to change our name to: "*The Less Cars in Cities Open > Collaborative*"? Or something along those lines? > > > > Now this is not by any means to suggest that I am running away from the > idea of organizing your own Car Free Day. Heaven forbid! as my dear > grandmother would have put it. A Car Free Day got right can be a wonderful > instrument for mobilizing opinion, building local consistencies for change, > for fewer cars and for better and softer (and more efficient) cities. But it > is only one of the instruments that we need to be considering. > > > > I probably should add by way of further background in the case you are not > aware of it, we also have a collaborative program, the New Mobility Agenda > (at http://www.newmobility.org), but the focus of the agenda is much wider > than 'less cars' strategies and events. Still, you can see how they relate. > But that said, I also think that there is a place here for a more focused > (and maybe at times a bit wilder) program. > > > > Thanks for letting me know what you think we should if anything do with > this. In the meantime, what about checking into the > > > > Eric Britton > > > > PS. By the way and for the record and just to be sure, this is not > (exactly) an anti-car forum. There are plenty of them around ? check > http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enFR177&q=anti-carfor a list of more than 300,000. What you have here a 'lots less cars in > cities' forum which is, as you will see, a very different animal indeed. > > > > > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries > (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is > on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > -- ------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060721/6294ab9a/attachment.html From sujit at vsnl.com Sat Jul 22 03:06:36 2006 From: sujit at vsnl.com (Sujit Patwardhan) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:36:36 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Re: Time for a change? In-Reply-To: <003701c6ac8d$30e63fc0$6501a8c0@Home> References: <003701c6ac8d$30e63fc0$6501a8c0@Home> Message-ID: <4cfd20aa0607211106t261b7edcya9decf12d1a66120@mail.gmail.com> 21 July 2006 Dear Eric, I'm sure the response will vary according to where one's coming from and also according to one's make up. I've always felt that we are far too defensive when called "extremists". The way cities in the third world are being taken over by "car culture" I feel it is necessary to stand up and say "Hey is this what we want?" This invariably prompts those who follow the conventional path to say - environmentalists are "anti progress" or "anti-development". Instead of trying to skirt the issue by saying "we are not anti development" and trying to explain how a healthy environment is the foundation for sustainable development, it is sometimes better to go on the offensive and give examples of destructive development which is at the root of environmental disasters like the Tsunami, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gasses, depleting forest cover for the earth, pollution and its impact on human health and long term economic growth, are all examples which prove that environmental sustainability is not an abstract term but something real that can be controlled and changed by a shift in our behaviour. But this shift cannot come about by paying lip service to good practices. So in this case I see nothing wrong in saying clearly and firmly that we have been going along a path that has no future and there is urgent need to recognize this before we can take corrective action. It's time to ask if the automobile and auto oriented development can sustain itself in tomorrows world of depleting resources, increasing pollution, increasing inequity and social strife and if options exist to make a sensible choice in favour of a more sensible alternative. If that means proposing "Carfree Cities" as one of the options to consider, one shouldn't shy away from saying it. Of course this is not the same as saying "Ban the Car" but one can and should invite people to consider the option, to ask if tomorrows cities can make space for "life without a car" possible. I could go on but I think I've said enough for a start. -- Sujit Parisar/PTTF Pune India On 7/21/06, Eric Britton wrote: > > Dear Friends, > > > > Even great ideas need to be rethought and renewed from time to time. > > > > Since 1994, this program has been called World Car Free Days and has sat > here at http://worldcarfreeday.com seating away and trying to do its part > in getting its message across. And what is that message? Well not so much > Car Free Days per se, but rather, as we put it in the opening lines of this > fine caf?: "*Not quite zero cars (in most places) but, let us say, a lot > less cars, a more tranquil environment, and a lot more safe and happy > people."* > > * * > > So here is my question to you and I would very much like to have your > counsel. > > > > Is it now time to change our name to: "*The Less Cars in Cities Open > Collaborative*"? Or something along those lines? > > > > Now this is not by any means to suggest that I am running away from the > idea of organizing your own Car Free Day. Heaven forbid! as my dear > grandmother would have put it. A Car Free Day got right can be a wonderful > instrument for mobilizing opinion, building local consistencies for change, > for fewer cars and for better and softer (and more efficient) cities. But it > is only one of the instruments that we need to be considering. > > > > I probably should add by way of further background in the case you are not > aware of it, we also have a collaborative program, the New Mobility Agenda > (at http://www.newmobility.org), but the focus of the agenda is much wider > than 'less cars' strategies and events. Still, you can see how they relate. > But that said, I also think that there is a place here for a more focused > (and maybe at times a bit wilder) program. > > > > Thanks for letting me know what you think we should if anything do with > this. In the meantime, what about checking into the > > > > Eric Britton > > > > PS. By the way and for the record and just to be sure, this is not > (exactly) an anti-car forum. There are plenty of them around ? check > http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enFR177&q=anti-carfor a list of more than 300,000. What you have here a 'lots less cars in > cities' forum which is, as you will see, a very different animal indeed. > > > > > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries > (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is > on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > -- ------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060721/6294ab9a/attachment-0001.html From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Sat Jul 22 17:32:02 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Eric Britton) Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2006 10:32:02 +0200 Subject: [sustran] Pedestrian Congestion Charge project in Edinburgh. Message-ID: <007401c6ad69$4f8ed590$6401a8c0@Home> For you to get a feel for the new and quite different look and feel for the website that has long been labeled the World Car Free Days Collaborative at http://worldcarfreeday.com - I'd like to point you to the following little video which you will find among 37 others (last count this morning) in our new Lots Less Cars in Cities Video Library which you can click to direct from the top menu of the website (you'll see it), Alternatively you can click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeRDRmEQMPk and be taken to a two minute video clip which reports on a Pedestrian Congestion Charge project in Edinburgh. It carries the legend: "You are now entering Edinburgh City Centre's new Pedestrian Congestion Charging Zone" and shows how this excellent concept can be put to work. After all, you use it, you should pay for it. Eh? BTW, this makes an excellent project for a Car Free Day. And so too does the Vancouver "How to Build Your Own Car Park" project that you can also see in the Less Cars library, or direct via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vv34N4-2VY &search=%22car%20park%22 The new address for the site - which is now known as "The Lots Less Cars in Cities Idea Factory" - is http://lotslesscars.org You may want to make a note of that. Thanks to a number of you for your private communications and encouragement for this re-labeling exercise and the work that now has to follow to make it stick. The whole concept of Car Free Days is still very much in the center of this, but the push to a broader and much stronger "less cars" orientation can, I sincerely believe, only serve to make this a more effective rallying point for our ideas, discussions and, one earnestly hopes, remedial projects and actions. It was, after all, the fundamental underlying theme that was intended in the original Car Free Day challenge that was issued in Toledo Spain back in October 1994. A long time ago. And which somehow seems to have got lost in the rush to getting large numbers of cities signing up for an administrated (and marginal) one day, once a year event. The original idea is that every day is a good one for a Car Free (or a Lots Less Cars) Day. Eric Britton PS. Still wide open to comments and suggestions on this in process transformation. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060722/748b5ae2/attachment.html From edelman at greenidea.info Sat Jul 22 19:22:01 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2006 12:22:01 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Share car, make friends, save planet In-Reply-To: <1065.213.220.212.252.1153319168.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> References: <8C91742CAD38BB42B1703D7D2BD0DCB10E7529@MBX03.stf.nus.edu.sg> <1065.213.220.212.252.1153319168.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Message-ID: <1127.62.141.25.33.1153563721.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> The following is friendly enough, but it would have been obvious to say something about organised carsharing and even continuing to halve the pollution, costs etc he mentions (half, then half of a half, and so on...) - T In this week's Green Room, transport planner and engineer Dr Richard Ghail urges you to get out of your car, save money and the environment, and make some new friends along the way. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5197920.stm ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Moravsk? 30 CZ-12000 Praha 2 ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From eric.britton at ecoplan.org Mon Jul 24 19:18:44 2006 From: eric.britton at ecoplan.org (Administrative User) Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:18:44 +0200 Subject: [sustran] "Moving forward : towards better urban transport" - in the open video library In-Reply-To: <200607232020.k6NKKmuo096942@britton1.securesites.net> Message-ID: <006201c6af0a$90c87d70$6401a8c0@Home> If you go to our in-process New Mobility Video Libraries, you will see three great entries just posted by Paul Barter. The details on this three part entry entitled "Moving forward : towards better urban transport" are given below. The easiest way to view these and the other 68 selected videos already lodged there is via the New Mobility Advisory at http://www.newmobilityadvisory.org where you will see mid way down on the left menu a Video Libraries link. From there click Global South and once there you will see the videos listed a bit down on that page. Thanks Paul. This is exactly the sort of thing we are looking for. Now, for the rest of us . . . your videos ? ericbritton PS. To sign in and to access all these videos in the future, all you have to do is go to http://www.youtube.com/signup?next=/index and pop in the several bits of identifying information they ask for. Moving forward : towards better urban transport" gives a brief introduction to some of the issues related to modern urban transport in the 'global South', with a focus on Southeast Asia. With footage from Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, this documentary outlines problems associated with transport in cities. It also introduces some of the key tools to tackle these challenges, and make urban transport safer, cleaner, healthier and more people-friendly. Part 2 of "Moving forward : towards better urban transport" looks at approaches to solving urban transport problems. This documentary gives a brief introduction to some of the issues related to modern urban transport in the 'global South', with a focus on Southeast Asia. With footage from Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, this documentary outlines problems associated with transport in cities. It also introduces some of the key tools to tackle these challenges, and make urban transport safer, cleaner, healthier and more people-friendly. Part 3 of "Moving forward : towards better urban transport" continues a look at solutions to urban transport problems. This documentary gives a brief introduction to some of the issues related to modern urban transport in the 'global South', with a focus on Southeast Asia. With footage from Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, this documentary outlines problems associated with transport in cities. It also introduces some of the key tools to tackle these challenges, and make urban transport safer, cleaner, healthier and more people-friendly. Credits: Produced in 2000 by the SUSTRAN Resource Centre (Malaysia) for the SUSTRAN Network, with the assistance of the Southeast Asia Regional Canada Fund. Produced and directed by Zaitun M. Kasim and Paul Barter. Video concept by Paul Barter, Tamim Raad, Zaitun M. Kasim; editing by Neil Felix, Pusat Komunikasi Masyarakat, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060724/d139bf25/attachment.html From paulbarter at nus.edu.sg Mon Jul 24 19:25:07 2006 From: paulbarter at nus.edu.sg (Paul Barter) Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 18:25:07 +0800 Subject: [sustran] 'Moving Forward' video now online Message-ID: As some of you may remember, six years ago I and a few others made an educational SUSTRAN Network video on urban transport issues with a focus on Southeast Asia. It is called, "Moving Forward: towards better urban transport". We initially made it available on videocasette and VCD but it was not easy to distribute that way. Finally I have managed today to post the 22 minute video online (in three parts) on YouTube. Apologies that it is a little grainy unless watched in a small window. You can get to it via my blog (http://urbantransportasia.blogspot.com/) OR via the Global South Mobility Library on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/groups_videos?name=globalsouth) which Eric Britton set up and announced here recently (which prompted me to get my act together and upload Taking Steps) OR via youtube directly: Part 1 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzwH9pme-J8 Part 2 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsRRXfa9-uo Part 3 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AV7s3dFcBA It is not a super professional effort but I hope you will find it useful and interesting. It is aimed at non-experts and at countering some of the common misunderstandings. Lots of footage from various Southeast Asian cities. Best wishes, Paul Paul A. Barter | Assistant Professor | LKY School of Public Policy | National University of Singapore | 29 Heng Mui Keng Terrace | Singapore 119620 | Tel: +65-6516 3324 | Fax: +65-6778 1020 | Email: paulbarter@nus.edu.sg | http://www.lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/faculty/paulbarter/ | I am speaking for myself, not for my employers. Perspectives on urban transport in developing countries: http://urbantransportasia.blogspot.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060724/b4564cf3/attachment.html From sujit at vsnl.com Mon Jul 24 22:46:33 2006 From: sujit at vsnl.com (Sujit Patwardhan) Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 19:16:33 +0530 Subject: [sustran] Re: 'Moving Forward' video now online In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4cfd20aa0607240646ua5f0178yb19fba865c54128@mail.gmail.com> Great job Paul. Look forward to more. -- Sujit On 7/24/06, Paul Barter wrote: > > As some of you may remember, six years ago I and a few others made an > educational SUSTRAN Network video on urban transport issues with a focus on > Southeast Asia. It is called, "Moving Forward: towards better urban > transport". We initially made it available on videocasette and VCD but it > was not easy to distribute that way. > > Finally I have managed today to post the 22 minute video online (in three > parts) on YouTube. Apologies that it is a little grainy unless watched in a > small window. > > You can get to it via my blog (*http://urbantransportasia.blogspot.com/*) > > > OR via the Global South Mobility Library on youtube (* > http://www.youtube.com/groups_videos?name=globalsouth*) > which Eric Britton set up and announced here recently (which prompted me to > get my act together and upload Taking Steps) > > OR via youtube directly: > Part 1 at ***http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzwH9pme-J8* > Part 2 at ***http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsRRXfa9-uo* > Part 3 at ***http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AV7s3dFcBA* > > It is not a super professional effort but I hope you will find it useful > and interesting. It is aimed at non-experts and at countering some of the > common misunderstandings. Lots of footage from various Southeast Asian > cities. > > Best wishes, > Paul > > Paul A. Barter | Assistant Professor | LKY School of Public Policy | > National University of Singapore | 29 Heng Mui Keng Terrace | Singapore > 119620 | Tel: +65-6516 3324 | Fax: +65-6778 1020 | Email: > paulbarter@nus.edu.sg | *http://www.lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/faculty/paulbarter/* > | I am speaking for myself, not for my employers. > > Perspectives on urban transport in developing countries: *** > http://urbantransportasia.blogspot.com/* > > > > ================================================================ > SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, > equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries > (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is > on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > -- ------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060724/58b843da/attachment.html From ericbruun at earthlink.net Tue Jul 25 05:13:17 2006 From: ericbruun at earthlink.net (Eric Bruun) Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:13:17 -0400 (GMT-04:00) Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Message-ID: <1494906.1153771997203.JavaMail.root@elwamui-hybrid.atl.sa.earthlink.net> There is another error in this analysis. Someone already mentioned the impact of fuel consumption in long supply chains -- the US is extremely inefficient because too much is concentrated in California and uses too much irrigation and fertilizer. But perhaps even more important, high rates of grain-fed meat consumption make a much larger difference in energy consumption than exercise. Feeding grain to animals instead of to people is highly inefficient. Eric Bruun -----Original Message----- >From: Lee Schipper >Sent: Jul 21, 2006 12:37 PM >To: 'Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport' , carlos.pardo@sutp.org >Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? > >Careful, the key to his thesis is that the extra length of life cyclists or others who esercise get translates into extra CO2 consumption, using >the US per capita CO2 consumption as a way of estimating that difference. > >>>> carlos.pardo@sutp.org 7/21/2006 9:04 AM >>> >Nobody who is a real cyclist will eat like a pig, or spend more resources >than he or she should (I hope). I guess the author of the study thinks that >everyone eats the same and the increase of hunger will increase the amount >of food they eat. I would expect that from a couch potato. Or do they eat >little? Of course, they die earlier. > >I know! Let's ride a bicycle to death! I almost got hit by a car half an >hour ago coming back from my morning ride. I guess that is the most >sustainable way to live... or die. > >Carlos F. Pardo >Coordinador de Proyecto >GTZ - Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC) >Cl 125bis # 41-28 of 404 >Bogot? D.C., Colombia >Tel: +57 (1) 215 7812 >Fax: +57 (1) 236 2309 >Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662 >e-mail: carlos.pardo@sutp.org >P?gina: www.sutp.org > > >-----Mensaje original----- >De: sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org >[mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org] En >nombre de Sunny >Enviado el: Viernes, 21 de Julio de 2006 05:30 a.m. >Para: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport >Asunto: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? > >Nice article but many things to think of...just becoz cyclists live >longer and eat more is cycling bad?...something to think of....how about >thinking of sustainable consumption rather....If the developed countries >consumed in a sustainable way then the world would have been a different >place. Though India is 2nd most populated country in the world but how >much energy does India consume compared to the developed counterparts? >Increasing demand of energy in India or China is for the industrial >activities which feed the developed countries. Self Sufficiency is the >buzz word I guess. When India cannot feed its own people why are we >planning to meet the needs of others (Only my govt. shud know). > >KEEP BIKING FOLKS!!! > >Sunny > >(I hope we wont end in a future where killing human is the only >sustainable alternative for living???? may be or maybe not) > >Francis Papon wrote: >> Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, >> investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear >> proliferation is a blessing. >> >> But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is >> it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow >> a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic >> way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human >> species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or >> to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? > > >================================================================ >SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, >equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries >(the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is >on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > >================================================================ >SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > >================================================================ >SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From SCHIPPER at wri.org Tue Jul 25 09:49:32 2006 From: SCHIPPER at wri.org (Lee Schipper) Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 20:49:32 -0400 Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? Message-ID: As I said earlier in this chain, there is no justification for taking the average extra time a person lives because of cyclying and multiplying that by the avewrge per capita US energy use or CO2 emissions to figure out how much MORE is emitted. >>> Eric Bruun 7/24/2006 4:13 PM >>> There is another error in this analysis. Someone already mentioned the impact of fuel consumption in long supply chains -- the US is extremely inefficient because too much is concentrated in California and uses too much irrigation and fertilizer. But perhaps even more important, high rates of grain-fed meat consumption make a much larger difference in energy consumption than exercise. Feeding grain to animals instead of to people is highly inefficient. Eric Bruun -----Original Message----- >From: Lee Schipper >Sent: Jul 21, 2006 12:37 PM >To: 'Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport' , carlos.pardo@sutp.org >Subject: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? > >Careful, the key to his thesis is that the extra length of life cyclists or others who esercise get translates into extra CO2 consumption, using >the US per capita CO2 consumption as a way of estimating that difference. > >>>> carlos.pardo@sutp.org 7/21/2006 9:04 AM >>> >Nobody who is a real cyclist will eat like a pig, or spend more resources >than he or she should (I hope). I guess the author of the study thinks that >everyone eats the same and the increase of hunger will increase the amount >of food they eat. I would expect that from a couch potato. Or do they eat >little? Of course, they die earlier. > >I know! Let's ride a bicycle to death! I almost got hit by a car half an >hour ago coming back from my morning ride. I guess that is the most >sustainable way to live... or die. > >Carlos F. Pardo >Coordinador de Proyecto >GTZ - Proyecto de Transporte Sostenible (SUTP, SUTP-LAC) >Cl 125bis # 41-28 of 404 >Bogot? D.C., Colombia >Tel: +57 (1) 215 7812 >Fax: +57 (1) 236 2309 >Mobile: +57 (3) 15 296 0662 >e-mail: carlos.pardo@sutp.org >P?gina: www.sutp.org > > >-----Mensaje original----- >De: sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org >[mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+carlos.pardo=sutp.org@list.jca.apc.org] En >nombre de Sunny >Enviado el: Viernes, 21 de Julio de 2006 05:30 a.m. >Para: Asia and the Pacific sustainable transport >Asunto: [sustran] Re: Are bicycles good for the environment? > >Nice article but many things to think of...just becoz cyclists live >longer and eat more is cycling bad?...something to think of....how about >thinking of sustainable consumption rather....If the developed countries >consumed in a sustainable way then the world would have been a different >place. Though India is 2nd most populated country in the world but how >much energy does India consume compared to the developed counterparts? >Increasing demand of energy in India or China is for the industrial >activities which feed the developed countries. Self Sufficiency is the >buzz word I guess. When India cannot feed its own people why are we >planning to meet the needs of others (Only my govt. shud know). > >KEEP BIKING FOLKS!!! > >Sunny > >(I hope we wont end in a future where killing human is the only >sustainable alternative for living???? may be or maybe not) > >Francis Papon wrote: >> Following this rationale, murderers are heroes and should be rewarded, >> investment in the weapon industry is the most sustainable and nuclear >> proliferation is a blessing. >> >> But there is a point: what is the ultimate goal of mankind, if any? Is >> it to make as many people as possible sustain a dull life, or to allow >> a happy few enjoy brilliant achievements? Or to put it in diachronic >> way, is it better to ensure the longest possible survival of the human >> species, at the price of enforcing for ever unfortunate lifestyles, or >> to promote the delightful current party, however short it may be? > > >================================================================ >SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, >equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries >(the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is >on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > >================================================================ >SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. > > > >================================================================ >SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. ================================================================ SUSTRAN-DISCUSS is a forum devoted to discussion of people-centred, equitable and sustainable transport with a focus on developing countries (the 'Global South'). Because of the history of the list, the main focus is on urban transport policy in Asia. From sksunny at gmail.com Tue Jul 25 12:16:25 2006 From: sksunny at gmail.com (Sunny) Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:16:25 +0700 Subject: [sustran] Good Days for Bangkok after Elections??? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <44C58D09.1010904@gmail.com> Hi all...The following was published today in the Bangkok Post...Hope it really materialises....Sunny *Democrats declare five policy priorities */*Speeding up rapid bus project among them*/ *Source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/25Jul2006_news04.php * The Democrats yesterday vowed to implement five policy priorities for city development, including the sluggish bus rapid transit (BRT) project. Bangkok Governor Apirak Kosayodhin, who is also a deputy Democrat party leader, said the four other policies were a free and comprehensive fundamental education for Bangkok children, outreach healthcare services for families and communities, the promotion of the sufficiency economy concept and enhancing the city environment. Mr Apirak was holding a press conference together with Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva. Mr Abhisit said traffic would continue to be the top priority of the city administration under the Democrats. He said the party would ensure that three extended routes of the electric rail transit systems and the BRT project materialised. The BRT will help feed passengers to the three new rail transit systems _ the extensions from the existing skytrain system _ the Onnuj and Soi Baring (Sukhumvit 107), Mor Chit and Kasetsart University, and Taksin to Thon Buri routes. "We hope the government will listen to the voices of Bangkok residents. City voters voted for us because they want to see the progress of our transport projects. "We've tried to seek the government's support for the BRT project several times, but without success. The government should not let political interests get in the way of the project," said the Bangkok governor. The BRT project was initially approved in late-2003 by the Committee for Management of Land Traffic chaired by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. It was expected to be implemented from 2004 to 2006. However, Mr Abhisit said the Transport Ministry refused to issue a licence for buses to operate under the BRT project. The licence is limited to buses under the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority (BMTA). Mr Apirak said the city administration had sent letters inquiring after the progress of the Thaksin government on the BRT project several times. In response, the caretaker government told the agency to wait for the new national government to be formed, he said. "As a major winner in the City Council elections, we have the mandate to push for those projects," said the governor. He also said the city administration would seek approval for three rail transit systems out of the fiscal 2007 budget from the new City Council at its first meeting. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.jca.apc.org/public/sustran-discuss/attachments/20060725/f67d2f86/attachment.html From Geoff.Gardner at northyorks.gov.uk Tue Jul 25 16:56:59 2006 From: Geoff.Gardner at northyorks.gov.uk (Geoff Gardner) Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 08:56:59 +0100 Subject: [sustran] [Kyoto2020] Re: Transportation Modal Choice in Asian Cities Message-ID: In response to quite an old email, and with apologies if it is outside your remit, may I draw your attention to the following. http://www.transport-links.org/transport_links/filearea/publications/1_708_ORN%2011-%20.pdf It is not earth shattering strategy, or mega-sophisticated maths, but it is a basic guide to measuring transport problems. It is quite well done and very good in parts (I can be modest because I only did the other parts). One intention was that instead of worrying about whether a method for measuring saturation flow had a statistical bias, for example, we aimed more at ensuring we found a method that was least prone to total blunders. Some of the language may be out of date now (I prefer to use the term 'low income countries') but I still commend it to you and would ask that you tell your friends in the field. A development of this was traffic signals guide and then an audit methodology for the whole city. This would be a fantastic thing to have as an interactive community website. I do not have the skills, however, so would welcome support from a keen volunteer. Best regards from Northallerton, a small town in the North of England (temperature 32C / 90F today) Geoff ------------------------------------------------------------- Geoff Gardner, Travel Awareness Officer Env. Services, North Yorkshire County Council County Hall, Northallerton, N Yorks DL7 8AH Tel 01609 532371 fax 779838 mobile: 0771 500 9425 email geoff.gardner@northyorks.gov.uk web: www.northyorks.gov.uk/environment/travelwise WARNING This E-mail and any attachments may contain information that is confidential or privileged, and is intended solely for the use of the named recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, please be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken is prohibited and may be unlawful. Any opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the view of the Council. North Yorkshire County Council. From edelman at greenidea.info Fri Jul 28 16:28:44 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 09:28:44 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Asian Infrastructure Congress 29.11- 1.12.2006 In-Reply-To: <1494906.1153771997203.JavaMail.root@elwamui-hybrid.atl.sa.earthlink.n et> References: <1494906.1153771997203.JavaMail.root@elwamui-hybrid.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <2228.62.141.25.33.1154071724.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Scheduled from 29 November - 1 December 2006 in Hong Kong, the 2nd annual Asian Infrastructure Congress is an established event that provides a neutral platform where infrastructure development planning meets project financing. It is where infrastructure plans are discussed, projects are presented and innovative financing tools are shared. It is where public-private partnership is once again studied in greater details. Infrastructure development in Hong Kong, China, Indonesia Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings - an infrastructure powerhouse - will be presenting at this Congress. Mr Kam Hing Lam, the group managing director, being the keynote speaker, will present the powerhouse's success story and strategy in developing infrastructure projects regionally and internationally, and how Cheung Kong Infrastructure has grown to become the largest publicly listed infrastructure company in Hong Kong. Indonesia's infrastructure development and investment is always on the top of every project developer and financier's agenda. Suyono Dikun, the deputy minister for Indonesia's infrastructure and regional development at the coordinating ministry for economic affairs, said that over the coming five years, Indonesia would need about US$63 billion in new investment in the infrastructure sector. By November, it is expected that a number of new regulations and laws would be put in place. The new rules would replace regulations dating back to 1967, and would seek to improve legal standards, ease restrictive central and local government interference, and reduce the length of time required to set up a business to about 30 days compared to 150 days at present. Mr Dikun will of course, be a key speaker at the 2nd annual Asian Infrastructure Congress, whom you should come and meet up with. China - the next big infrastructure powerhouse. Projects galore. But which is the less risky project to finance? What is the government doing to attract your investment dollar? Get the inside scoop on how you can mitigate your risks in private-public partnerships, from Prof Dr Wang Shou Qing, who has been involved with researching and consulting on BOT/PPP projects in China. Other confirmed speakers to date: Augusto Santos, Deputy Director General, National Economic and Development Authority, Philippines Madhu Terdal, Chief Financial Officer - Corporate Strategic Finance, GMR Group, India Vijay Sethu, Chief Executive Officer, CIMB Standard Strategic Asset Advisors Sdn Bhd Professor Priyantha Wijayatunga, Chairman, South Asia Forum for Infrastructure Regulation Sanjiv Garg, Executive Director (PP&D), Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd, India Kazuo Ueda, Managing Director, Japan PFI Association Geoff Haley, Chairman, International Project Finance Association It's going to be an exciting and highly interactive conference. Enjoy 20% Early Bird discount! Register NOW! Come and be part of this exciting growth! If you would like to speak, attend or sponsor, call the Asian Infrastructure Congress team now on +65 6322 2712 or email to anna.lee@terrapinn.com for details. Visit www.terrapinn.com/2006/aic for a good understanding of the 2005 show, and new ideas for 2006. Organised by: Our distingushed panel of speakers at AIC 2005: Pongsak Ruktapongpisal Minister of Transport Royal Thai Government Paul Reddel Regional Program Leader f or East Asia Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility World Bank Suyono Dikun Deputy Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, Indonesia Augusto Santos Director General National Economic and Development Authority Philippines Smt Neelam Sanghi Director (Finance) Ministry of Civil Aviation, India ------------------------------------------------------ this message has been forwarded and not necesarily endorsed by: Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network From edelman at greenidea.info Mon Jul 31 17:30:39 2006 From: edelman at greenidea.info (Todd Edelman) Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:30:39 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [sustran] Refugees taught how to use and design American roads Message-ID: <2800.85.160.17.235.1154334639.squirrel@mail.smartweb.cz> Culture shock One of the major challenges for organisers is to change the way the refugees think about cars. Many of the new arrivals suffered from lack of access - which they blamed on a lack of mobility - and came from places where cars were scarce. "I have been here just a few months and its very disorientating... How will I shop for dates to break my Ramadan fasting? And, where do I get halal goat meat?" Some want to make up for a lifetime in which they were denied cars. Others gravitate towards hybrid cars, believing they are a great source of vitamins... Adapted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5216960.stm *** :-) So... any thoughts on how to adapt this programme? - T ------------------------------------------------------ Todd Edelman Director Green Idea Factory Moravsk? 30 120 00 Praha 2 Czech Republic ++420 605 915 970 edelman@greenidea.info http://www.worldcarfree.net/onthetrain Green Idea Factory, a member of World Carfree Network