Inside World: what could be more than

what could be more dangerous
than outraged poor person
with long knife

A Short History of Ridesharing in North America

This excellent review of ridesharing history, practices, trends and issues in North America was recently presented by its author, Susan Shaheen of the University of California, Berkeley, to a Webinar organised by the Ridesharing Institute. You may want to give particular attention to her last two pages which are more forward looking: Key Questions from Workshop and Factors to Consider.

Get in! (It’s that simple)

We have of late not been giving the necessary attention due to the thousand blossoms of ridesharing, an absolute essential ingredient in the New Mobility Mix of services for our cities, and countryside.  To start to make up for this embarrassing lapse, here is the text of an editorial from last week’s New Zealand Herald in Auckland New Zealand.

Learning curves (Getting on the right side of them)

This is a wonderful little video  that looks without any pretense and with limited means at a local roundabout project on Main Street USA. It is worth your attention on at least four grounds. First, because roundabouts make great good sense in cities and we need a lot more of them.  Second, and not to forget, they offer real technical challenges that need to be met with skill. Third, they are organic, i.e., learning projects, i.e., New Mobility par excellence.  And finally,  they need to be sold to all involved (which many times is not just a one-shot information pitch). The wisdom of the young team behind this project is to be commended, and emulated.

The Sharing Economy Comes Home to World Streets

*  Click here for our 226 articles on sharing.

Economic Growth Enigma: Money or Energy

Professor Robert Ayres will be joining The Sustainable Development, Economy and Society Master Class at the ISG in Paris this year as a guest speaker on Thursday at 14:00.  You will find a short bio note summarizing some of the high points of his career and prolific  output just below. In his presentation  and in  the following question period Ayres will be looking at some important aspects of the future of the planet, which holds out some interesting clues for the future career and expertise choices of young people looking at a future business career.  As he rakes through the smoldering coals of a world soon to be  saddled with post-peak oil prices that will never again come back to “normal”, he may have a few clues for your future.

Archives: The Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis

During the early nineteen sixties the famed development economist, Albert Hirschman negotiated with the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, part of the World Bank group, the financial support that he needed for an extended visit to several WB development projects scattered throughout the poor areas of the world. The document where he reports his visit was the matter of much controversy between the IBRD staff and Hirschman. One of the major points of disagreement was the latter´s refusal to employ the technique of cost-benefit analysis, then very popular at the WB, as a measure of the success of a project.

Change has to take root in people’s minds (before it can be legislated)

Professor John Adams has spent quite some years in researching, thinking, talking and writing about risk, and about risk when it comes to how people get around in their daily lives. This posting is taken from his blog “Risk in a hypermobile world”  His attraction to transport problems grew out of his involvement in the 1970s and 80s as an objector at public inquiries, on behalf of Friends of the Earth, to the British Government’s road building plans. See “Hypermobility: too much of a good thing” for a summary of his current take on transport problems.

One more reason

Good things happen on the street when . . .

Good things happen on the street when the leading edge of the research, academic and NGO community in a city — who themselves are up to world standard — line up with the politicos.  And bad things  — very bad things — happen when the planning, investment and infrastructure decisions are made without respect to the experience and all that has been learned, tested and proved in the last decades at leading edge. (Now how hard is THAT?)

Due to lose? Well maybe not quite yet.

An article of April 26, 2013,” The Race of Our Lives”(GMO) by Jeremy Grantham, is a worthwhile read on your Tablet. Click here for article.)  .   In part because his basic thesis is that the white horse of hope for the future of our endangered species and planet just might turn out to be the triple whammy of (a) serious autopilot demographic downsizing, (b) deus ex machina help from our extended 21st century brains (think internet and/or Zetabytes) and (c) the bountiful near-term harvest of renewable energy. It’s a pretty good read for your spare time.

Archives: Putting the Wikipedia to work for the New Mobility Agenda. (And for you.)

From the beginning in the late eighties the New Mobility Agenda was conceived as a sharing, communications and didactic tool zeroing in on our chosen topic from a number of angles,  and over the last five years World Streets has continued in this tradition. The following working paper comes from the Sustran archives, and dates back to the opening days of 2007. Even today years later it still is useful if for nothing else as a checklist and reminder of what one concerned citizen felt was worth knowing about as we make important policy decisions in our sector.

Archives: The dangers of shared taxis (2005)

Discussion from archives of the New Mobility Agenda as recorded on  Sustran Global South on 16 Nov. 2005. Simon Norton writes from Cambridge, UK:

When one introduces shared taxis one has to guard against the danger that they take people off buses and trains (or off their feet or bikes) rather than off cars. If so they will actually increase the number of motor vehicles, and furthermore unless the system is transparent and available to casual users (i.e. one doesn’t have to live in the area, belong to a club, or book ages in advance) they may prevent the development of genuinely comprehensive mobility systems.”

Inside world: on bus dog at my knee

on bus dog at my knee
waiting for sweet voice
to tell when we arrive

Inside world: whatever we do surely the planet

whatever we do
surely the planet will survive
doubts about mankind

New Mobility Partnerships 2013: An Invitation

New Mobility Consult is the advisory and consulting arm of World Streets and its world-wide network of international partners, publications, programs, social media and focus groups. This open collaborative program  has been dedicated to sustainable transport policy and practice since 1988. Here are some of the ways in which this international competence can be put to work for your city, agency or firm in 2013.

Inside world: getting on bus old legs hurting

getting on the bus
old legs hurting with each step
then the driver smiled

Support World Streets and the New Mobility Agenda

We have no money gentlemen, so we shall have to think.
– Ernest Rutherford, on taking over Cavendish Laboratory in 1919

World Streets is an independent  public interest publication of the New Mobility Agenda made freely available to all who are looking to understand, support, and contribute to the sustainability agenda anywhere in the world. We firmly believe that there should be no barriers, and especially not commercial ones, to the free circulation of ideas, news, tools  and peer exchanges when it comes to the important issues of sustainable development and social justice.  To ensure our full independence we do not accept advertising. We depend on the support of our readers, concerned public agencies, foundations and actors in the private sector to keep going.

Weekend musing: Cycling your mind

One of the main strategic underpinnings of New Mobility Agenda, and certainly of everything that appears here in World Streets, is that if we are ever to reinvent transportation in our cities, as we so badly need to do, we must in the process free ourselves from our old ways of seeing, thinking and doing things. For example, when you think “bicycle” . . .

Letter to our 3,865 faithful subscribers

Lyon, 27 April 2013

Dear World Streets Reader.

This is the first of three short letters I intend to send in the coming days to the 3,865 readers of World Streets who have signed in from a total of 149 different countries.  It outlines our invitation for collaboration and cooperation in different cities and different parts of the world, aiming to advance the agenda for sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives. 

Speeding to a standstill

This is an interesting and useful article. The topic is timely and important. The approach and methodology are interesting.  And in it  you will find a certain number of points  which I regard as timely, important and very much worth saying again and again. In a couple of instances I find their conclusions and interpretations a bit puzzling, but let me keep them to myself for now and avoid getting between you and the authors. It’s time to step aside and let them speak for themselves.

New Mobility Consult: Partner for Sustainable Transport

New Mobility Consult is the advisory and consulting arm of World Streets and its world-wide network of international partners, publications, programs, social media and focus groups. This open collaborative program  has been dedicated to sustainable transport policy and practice since 1988.   Here are some of the ways in which this international competence can be put to work for your city, agency or firm.

INVISIBILITY: Just because you can’t see it (or prefer not to) doesn’t mean . . .

  

You are warmly invited to comment on all or any of these.

Weekend Musing: One more reason why Africa does not matter

“In a fair world it should be unthinkable to ignore the needs of close to one billion of the poorest people on the earth living in its second-largest and second most-populous continent. A part of the world with already one-third of the population living in cities, most of whom in slums, and with a flow of people from the country side continuing at record rates.”

- From Cities, Transport and Equity in Africa: Unasked Questions

Brainstorm: Carsharing, and New Thinking about Transport in Cities

World  Carshare  Cities Program 2013 : Brainstorming notes of 11 April 2013

1. There are many many different ways to share cars in 2013 (far more in fact than most of even the experts talk about when they make presentations on carsharing).

2. This mix of ways of delivering these services is evolving at a speed that makes it a real challenge to keep up with the pace of developments. Even for the experts.