The Sharing Economy Comes Home to World Streets

*  Click here for our 226 articles on sharing.

Early this morning World Streets welcomed our 3000th registered reader

Early this morning World Streets welcomed our 3000th registered reader. After almost to the day four years of faithful service to the cause of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, since the beginning of the year we have started to receive a substantial increase in these contacts.  For example, even as I write this note, the number is up to 2015 (which you can confirm for yourself in the top right column). We feel proud and hope that you as one of our readers feel proud too. After all , the only reason we are here is to learn from each other and do what we can to make our cities and our planet fairer and better places for all, today and tomorrow.

Big House Equity Outreach: Bring in All Local Actors, Views & Implementation Partners

Too often when it comes to new transport initiatives, the practice is to concentrate on laying the base for the project in close working relationships with people and groups who a priori are favorably disposed to your idea, basically your choir. Leaving the potential “trouble makers” aside for another day. Experience shows that’s a big mistake. Instead from the beginning we have to take a . . .

Where did our readers come from in 2012?

Is World Streets doing its job? We asked 100 experts for their views – - and 101 responded.

World Streets needs to catch on before my feet get wet. – The  Netherlands

The results are there for all to see and judge. And we now know that we are going to need a literal world wide web of inputs, collaboration and other forms of support if we are to continue this independent international sustainability adventure in the year ahead. Is what we are doing useful and worthy of support? 101 of our readers picked up their pens and responded to our question.

Who is reading World Streets today?

This gallery contains 2 photos.

 

SUTP May/June Newsletter

The latest issue of the May/June SUTP newsletter has just been published and reports on the groups recent publications and activities, such as supporting training courses on transport in Malaysia, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and our contributions at Rio+20 Summit. You can pick it up freely here.

Who read World Streets this morning?

World Streets makes the claim that it is a truly international journal and world-wide collaborative effort. Anyone can say that, it’s an easy claim to make.  But just to put some muscle on it here is a map showing the points of origin of the readers who have come in thus far this morning. A day much like any other.

World Streets from Aug. 20 to Sept. 20: Gone fishin’

While World Streets is a collaborative journal fed by a steady flow of contributions of hundreds of contributors from countries around the world, plunging the depths and enormous variations of the challenges of sustainable transportation and sustainable cities, our entire massive editorial staff consists of a single person, also known as Eric Britton, your servant, whose day job it is to spot, incite, cajole and eventually coordinate the articles, photographs, illustrations, letters, commentaries and other media which regularly populate these pages.

But in the late summer month directly ahead, I will be unable to ensure this function since I have been invited to participate and take a significant role in no less than three major international projects which are online for that period and which are simply too good to miss. 

World Streets spring cleaning. Your views?

Want to have a look at the new layout and type face for World Streets that we are experimenting with as part of our annual spring cleaning, and let us know us what you think?  Our goal is to make it an easier and more efficient read, with a tighter format, better use of screen space,  and with the key links and tools more visible and easily accessible. Do you have any views on this?  And if so, please let us know with a single click below. Thank you.

Dear Reader. May we rent your brain?

World Streets iwill on 1 May close down regular publication until we have managed to resolve our challenging financial situation. If you share our deeply felt goals concerning the up-hill push to sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, read on and consider how you could lend a hand. We need both near term and more solid longer term backing in order to be able to continue to make our contribution. And for this, your ideas and contacts can be of real help. If you like what we are doing with World Streets, let me ask you to read on.

Who read World Streets this morning?

World Streets makes the claim that it is a truly international journal and world-wide collaborative effort.  That’s an easy claim to make, but just to put some muscle on it here is a map showing the points of origin of the readers who have come in thus far this morning.  A day much like any other.

Outreach for success: Local Actors & Implementation Partners

Too often when it comes to new transport initiatives, the practice is to concentrate on laying the base for the project in close working relationships with people and groups who a priori are favorably disposed to your idea, basically your choir. Leaving the potential “trouble makers” aside for another day. Experience shows that’s a big mistake. We have to take a . . .

We have no money gentlemen, so we shall have to think.

This is a personal call to those of you who have over the years participated in the rather numerous programs and working groups we have since 1988 carefully crafted and maintained in support of worldwide peer collaboration and exchange in our tough but important field: under the New Mobility Agenda, World Streets or one of its sister publications (see below), or who have of late plugged in to our pages on Facebook or Twitter. I feel pretty quite comfortable in doing this since you know what we are trying to do, and who better for me to turn to at a time of need. (And oh yes, for those who may not recall, that citation above was  by Nobel Prize winner Professor Ernest Rutherford, on taking over the quite broke Cavendish Laboratory in 1919, in the wake of the First World War.)

World Streets 2010: Aspirations, accomplishments, building blocks, and work still needed to move ahead

The most significant accomplishment over this last year has been that World Streets has somehow managed to continue publication on a weekly basis, and step by step to improve the journal and steadily build up our international readership and contributions. And all this really quite against the odds and with less than modicum of the necessary financial support. But good cause, high commitment and fair performance carry the day, with the result that each week anywhere from 700 to 2000 readers from more than fifty countries from all corners of the world come in to access the journal.

This week’s Social Space image – De Portugal, com amor

The power of images. We need a lot more than walls of words, reports and books to turn the world toward sustainability.  So to help our case we invite our readers to jump in and share with us striking “social space” graphics which illustrate the world’s streets and all that takes place thereon in many places and in many ways. And lo and behold, from time to time some very nice stuff pops up on the screen in our challenging 990 × 180 pixels pixels format . This morning for instance we had the luck to receive and to be able to share with you the splendid street scene you see above, showing an intersection of bus services right in the middle of the beautiful city of Lisbon. And all this thanks to our colleague Miguel Barroso from Lisbon.

Building knowledge and support: New Mobility Focus Groups

Group problem-solving and collaborative tool development have been among the key objectives of the New Mobility Agenda since its creation in 1988. Our thesis was and is that there are a growing number of able people and clever innovative projects around the world that are leading the way — and that it can be useful if we here at World Streets can help to open up peer dialogues and better link and support them. The tools we have developed and continue to make pretty good use of are, by today’s standards, very simple, but they do work.

"In the slums of Nairobi" What do you do when you are losing a war?

If it is your assumption that we are at present losing the war for sustainable transport and sustainable lives — and that is very definitely our position here at World Streets — and if it is your firm intention not to lose it — as it is ours! — then what do you do when the going gets tough? Well you look around and put to work every potentially promising tool you can lay your hands on. Now we make a pretty consistent effort in these pages to bring to your attention creative media that illustrates, renders more understandable and supports our noble cause. But we need more: so what about doing more along these lines taken from today’s edition of the International Herald Tribune?

Songs without Words. (Or trying very hard to get a commentary on reversing sprawl)

We invite our readers to write the words to the following “song”: 150 words max please, signed with your name, email, affiliation if any, city, country, and URL if you wish. You may either place your contribution just below clicking the COMMENTS link, or by email to editor@newmobility.org. At one point a selection of these comments will be sorted and integrated into a collaborative piece on this theme. Sorry, no other clues.

Population footprints: Barcelona vs. Atlanta

Now what?

Editor’s note: 22 May 2010 I have been scolded by several of our number who make the point that the above “song without words” title/proposal is far from clear. So with apologies, let me try to put it right.

The idea is that the graphic strikingly demonstrates one of the most important, and close to intractable, challenges of the move from Old to New Mobility, the huge dispersion of populations and activity that has been caused by the totally unthought-out shift from city living to a car-based hyper-spread life style. I was hoping to elicit comments on that, which is, it must be admitted, something like the proverbial challenge of getting the toothpaste back into the tube. There are responses, of that I am entirely sure, but it is going to be a tough job. So now, hopefully, your comments and clues?

Kind thanks to Lois Sturm, New York City for the heads-up on the graphics. (And to Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy for the inspiration.)

# # #

Supplemental figure and food for thought:

Urban density vs. transport energy consumption

When English is not enough. Well then let’s do it in Italian,. (Or Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, Chinese, French or . . .)

1. Start here: Italy, Italian and New Mobility. In June 2009, after four months of successful publication and an enthusiastic public reception in many parts of the world, the World Streets team found ourselves talking with an Italian colleague, the environmental activist Enrico Bonfatti who had been scanning the readership maps of World Streets and in the process noted that there were only one or two regular readers of the publication in Italy. Why? Good question.

Might it be that there was no interest in the concept of better explanation?

2. Time and language:
We concluded that Italy was in many ways a typical case, and that while there is plenty of interest in many parts of the country in these matters, almost everyone is suffering from major information overload on the one hand — and furthermore that very very few of us, even those of us who know another language well, are all that comfortable if we have to read daily dispatches on these complex if interesting matters in anything other than our own main language.

Now that may come as a surprise to anyone who thinks that English is taking over as the universal language. But if you actually take the time to speak with and get to know the people who are working with these matters at the level of cities, agencies, public interest groups, or even universities in different parts of the world, you will see that when it comes to day-to-day communication all of us really do work best in our main language. (The reactions to this claim turn out to be quite interesting and are by no means unanimous. However we have found upon careful examination and discussion with those directly involved that the thesis stands up to inspection and is realistic and relevant. So we have not hesitated to make it a pillar of our work.)

3. 1 July 2010: Nuova Mobilità goes on line in Italy.
After careful consideration and diligent preparations over a two-month period, starting on 1 July and with Enrico Bonfatti stepping forward as managing editor of the new publication, we set out on an adventure to bring these concepts into the daily life of colleagues across Italy, with the publication written in careful Italian and adapted for the Italian institutional context and felt priorities.

Over the remainder of 2009 we saw readership expanding regularly and could see from the stats that the journal was being visited by individuals and groups in more and more cities up and down the peninsula. As of this date we are seeing something on the order of anywhere from 100 to 200 Italian readers checking in each day, and thus far have noted visits from more than 60 Italian cities and, somewhat surprisingly, roughly 2 dozen from other parts of the world.

What is especially striking about this map for those of you happen to be familiar with Italy, is that in addition to the expected heavy readership in the northern half of the country, we are also seeing real interest from the South. This is an excellent sign for the future.

And if you wish to practice your Italian, nothing could be more simple: all you have to do is click to www.nuovamobilita.org. And if your usually excellent Italian should fill you, no problem, you will see the machine translation tool on the top left of the site. Benvenuti nel futuro della mobilità sostenibile in Italia.

4. What about other language/country editions?

One lesson we have abundantly learned over the last year of hard work in creating and publishing daily this Italian Journal is that it is not a job to be undertaken lightly. Despite the fact that roughly 2/3 of all the articles that appear are adapted from the latest postings of World Streets, there is more to it than simply having the skills to produce a good translation. The articles need to be selected and adapted for Italian readers, in the Italian cities, institutional and policy context; –but in addition to that there is the entire challenge of creating specific Italian content, which is also a time-consuming mission and which continues to be a process that even after all these months still needs to be fully engaged.

As result, we have discovered that organizing and maintaining anything along the lines of Nuova Mobilità is pretty close to a full-time job for one talented, hard-working person. This of course has economic implications, with which our readers will be entirely familiar.

5. Bridging the language gap:
What to do in the event that there is still this challenge of finding a way to bridge the language gap, but in a first instance perhaps not taking on the full load and financial implications of creating a new dedicated publication? This is a problem which we are facing with several colleagues and concerned organizations in Sweden, Finland, Portugal, France and Taiwan — and here is the way in which we are collaborating to get the job done.

The key lies in the creation of a special monthly edition of World Streets which provides in the target language a careful synopsis and one click access to the full contents of all content and commentaries published in the daily journal over the preceding month. These monthly reports are specially created by the World Streets team, working closely with the collaborating national sponsors in order to ensure that the final product is not only accurately and quickly developed, but that it is presented in a form which is agreeable to read and easy to move beyond through one-click links to the full sources in each case.

* * * Here is an example of a typical World Streets Monthly Edition, in this case is prepared to summarize for our subscribers/sponsors all items appearing over the month of April 2010 – http://tinyurl.com/ws-apr2010. For a copy of the other language editions, get in touch and we will be pleased to share them with you.

6. The last kilometer challenge

The “last kilometer” or “last mile” is, of course, a term from the telecommunications and cable television industries involving the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider (in this case World Streets) to an end-user (in this case you and your busy colleagues). Here it is specifically aimed at supporting and expanding the network of those agencies, local authorities, universities, operators, associations, consultants and concerned citizens working on these issues within their country or region.

The following diagram and notes are intended to give a picture of how this can be made to work.

Once the current monthly report has been prepared with our language partner, they are then dispatched to all of those in the host country who are concerned with these matters. This listing turns out to be quite extensive in all cases thus far encountered, and includes not only the key national ministries and agencies charged with matters of transport, environment, cities, economics, social justice and more, but also all those working on these challenges at the level of the specific city or local administration, researchers, transportation operators, university programs, consultants, public interest groups, concerned citizens, and the national media.

Our goal in each case is to create an outreach in which the map in each cooperating country will gradually grow and eventually come to resemble the same level of coverage which we are achieving in Italy.

7. Want to discuss a collaborative outreach project?

We will be pleased to provide further information on both approaches and invite interested readers to get in touch by phone, e-mail, snail mail, Skype or, best of all, this is the power so we can talk about all this in person. Here is a quick summary of our main contact information:

Eric Britton, Editor
World Streets/The New Mobility Partnerships
8, rue Jospeh Bara, 75006 Paris France
Tel. Europe – +331 7550 3788
USA +1 (213) 984 1277
Skype: newmobility

World Streets: First Steps on Facebook

We live in a time of not only ever greater problems and challenges before our sector but also one of fast evolving tools and other means of collaboration. each of the dozen-plus specialized fora and discussion areas that make up the New Mobility Agenda, and of course World Streets itself. We are obliged to work with the available free tools. Here is the latest addition to the lot – World Streets on Facebook.

In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.
- A. de Tocqueville, 1835

World Streets on Facebook:
To some of you this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but after all it is 2010 and after all (again) we are losing and losing big the war of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives. We have some important messages to share among us, and here is where we really have to make use of every tool out there which might be put to work for our good cause.

Hence in this case — and why not? — Facebook. So just yesterday we set up our best first cut of a Facebook page for World Streets, which you can now see, join, comment and use at www.facebook.worldstreets.org.

Home page text:
World Streets: First Steps is intended to serve as an open door for the Facebook community to the issues and contents of World Streets, the 21st century daily newspaper that has a single job: to provide you with high quality, readable, concise, food for thought and leads specifically on the topics of sustainable mobility, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, world-wide.

* Click image to expand.
Signing in:
To access the site you have first to create a Facebook page, but as most of our readers know this is no big deal and can be set up quickly in a reserved, professional and secure manner. That done, once on line all you have to do is click to www.facebook.worldstreets.org and there you are on the home page.

In closing, let me be the first to indicate that I do not at all have a clear picture of how this Facebook interface is going to work out. But I would be a poor friend of sustainable development and social justice if we did not at least give it our best shot.

Tell us what you think, either here or on Facebook. This is after all a team enterprise.

Eric Britton
Editor – editor@worldstreets.org

Prisoner of car? (Working note from Communications 101)

If it is your firm belief that God is on our side (Gott mit uns) and that we are winning the battle of sustainable transport and sustainable lives, you will probably have little use for anything that might show up on a popular environmental site like TreeHugger. But hey! we are losing, so we need to be prepared to use every trick, talent and channel we can lay our hands on. Here is a piece that appeared in TreeHugger last week that will tell you, dear reader, nothing you do not already know — but it is the telling of it that is the point. Let me put that in other words: we have plenty to learn from them when it comes to getting our message across to the general public. And that includes thee . . . and me.

Green Drinks: From Beer to Eternity? (Or more than a pretty web page)

When we first set up shop here in Paris some years ago, we thought a lot about creating lively and inviting environments for all kinds of people to get together and exchange ideas and learn from each other in our areas of common interest. But for the most part this took the form of the familiar mix of workshops, conferences, and of our various virtual get-togethers on the web. Then one day in 2007 we learned of Green Drinks, and thought to give it a go in Paris.

Introduction: Our goal back then was to create here in this big and busy city an inviting environment which would encourage serendipitous encounters which cut across the usual professional and disciplinary lines. For us it was important that participation be easy and open, and that it bring in young people and as many women as possible. And a wide range of different kinds of backgrounds and views. As luck would have it, a group of young Parisian professionals agreed to take over the actual running of the project, which they continue to do successfully to this day.

So on the occasion of your next trip to Paris if you want to take the temperature of the green agenda here in all its varieties be sure you check out the webpage at http://www.greendrinks.org//Paris. On the last Monday or each month, the action starts at 19h30 at the Café Epicerie, 38 rue Sambre et Meuse 75010 Paris. you can also check out the organizers blog at www.greendrinks-paris.org.

And oh yes, why don’t you give some thought to creating a Green Drinks in your own city. You just may surprise yourself? There are more people and more brains thinking about and working on these issues than most of us would ever guess. Try it and let us know how it works out.

Now let’s hear what Edwin Datschefski who was there at birth and is the International Coordinator of Green Drinks has to tell us about how all this came to be.

Green Drinks: From Beer to Eternity?

A bunch of us who work in the environmental field used to meet up for a beer in London once a month. It was a nice gathering, and we always encouraged people to invite others, so you never knew who would be there and they were always interesting people and great connections were made and cool ideas were had. We started in 1990 and called it Green Drinks.

We used to call round the week before and tell people the date and venue, and for a while we tried mass faxing, but it was quite hard work and this was of course just in our spare time and “borrowing” office resources etc. so we were very pleased when email finally became widespread and we could set up an email list to send out reminders.

We also set up a fixed date (second Tuesday of the month) and venue so people could easily remember the rule and also put it in their diaries ahead of time.

In 2000 I set up a website greendrinks.org as an easy-to-remember URL and soon after that we realised a few friends from Oxford were having their own Green Drinks too so we listed them on the website. Soon there were quite a few listed on the website so I handed over organisation of the London Green Drinks to Paul Scott, who still runs it, in order to concentrate on the now-international website. When I say ‘concentrate’ bear in mind this is all stuff in my spare time, the odd hour here and there.

New York City joined as the first US GD in 2002 and as Green Drinkers travelled the world and relocated jobs, more sprung up. Today in 2010 there are 600 Green Drinks in 62 countries.

I specifically used biological thinking in the design of Green Drinks. I wrote the Green Drinks Code (http://www.greendrinks.org/Start) as a code of practice but also as a genetic code, the DNA of the organism.

Green Drinks is biological in that it is:

Distributed — there is no central organisation, each city organiser can do what they like and maintains their own list of members.

Viral — member-get-member is the basic principle — a simple concept spread by word of mouth.

Adaptive — each Green Drinks city has its own logo and traits, the ones that work best for its location — some are a little formal, some rather random, some have speakers to break the ice (like in Scandinvia and some US cities), most are just freeform. The freeform nature of most of the mingling is the key, and this can be enhanced by good hosting and introduction-making on the night.

I think the strangest thing about Green Drinks is that the goals are so vague and the benefits hard to quantify — but they are undoubtedly there. Sometimes people say we should get some charitable or government funding, but then others will insist that independence is far more important. Of course it’s not much of a proposal in conventional terms — ‘We need this funding so me and my mates can go have a few beers together’ …

I’ve upgraded the website a few times in recent years, and we are flirting with on-line social networking via Facebook, Ning, Twitter etc but there are countless online environmental networks, and Green Drinks is fundamentally about face to face interaction in a room.

I have never made any predictions or even plans about Green Drinks, but I would guess we will continue to expand though this may well slow as of course sometimes cities drop out and that has to be matched with new cities joining up.

I think Green Drinks has some good lessons for other types of organisation who want to grow, and staying informal and ad hoc is a key one of them. Go along to a Green Drinks near you to see how it works, or drop me a line if you think I can help with any ideas on your organisation design.

# # #

Edwin Datschefski is the International Coordinator of Green Drinks, www.greendrinks.org . Edwin’s latest book, The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products, is proving to be a contemporary classic, introducing everyone from students to CEOs to the delights and nuances of sustainable product development.

A major sustainability challenge of 2010:Building a World-Wide Learning Community

Is there a requirement, a potentially useful role for a more creative and powerful system of linkage, dynamic multi-level interaction, information exchange and eventually collaboration between the many and fast growing number of outstanding programs and their considerable knowledge and competence bases, with specific reference to the issues, roles and possibilities of the new mobility transport policy, planning, and practice? And if so: who, when, what next?

Building a World-Wide Learning Community
Silos of competence and action:

This is an important and in our current view a very promising collaborative effort that got under way in mid 2008 in cooperation with the Sustainable Mobility program of the Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society (University of Michigan). We set out to ponder and then to see how we might work together to address these challenges.

Why do we have silos when what we need is deep team work?

Here are some of the structural and psychological reasons that you can spot that in various combinations account for this state of affairs:

• Distance
• Time (zones)
• Language
• Culture
• Time horizon focus (short-term, long-term orientation)
• Geographic focus
• Discipline focus
• Competence level
• Character/attitude
• Interests (declared and undeclared)
• Strategic
• Targeted areas of operations/specialization
• Time limitations
• Financial limitations
• Prefer to work alone
• Technical, communications limitations
• Ignorance (of others and possibilities for creative combination)
• Ego
• Competition for public attention
• Competition for financial support
• Turf protection

That’s a lot, eh? But we need to be lucid and this is the dominant physical and psycho-structure of our field as of 2010 as we enter 2010, and it is important as a first step for us to be fully aware of all these often rather tricky and for the most part very human values and differences. This is quite simply the terrain with which we have to work. (And incidentally, it helps if we all look into this mirror from time to time and see if we can spot ourselves. Including the author of this article, of course.)

Hence, all the more reason to see if we can find better ways to break down those silos and create a more powerful, better coordinated, more strategic capacity to work together and address the gargantuan problems we face.

Note: To give you some idea of the dimensions of the challenge, to date in our preparatory work we have identified more than six hundred sources, projects and programs active in this broad area – sustainable transportation and particularly in and around cities – most of them entirely autonomous, some very small, very local and very poor, others quite large and decently funded to make their targeted contributions. But even the largest and best funded of these groups constitute a very small force in the face of the dimensions of the challenges.

Project origins:

The concept of new mobility or sustainable transportation is gradually gaining credibility as an alternative strategy for the policy, development and management of city transport systems worldwide. Starting from a very different series of basic conditions, premises and priorities to the transportation policies and practices that largely dominated the 20th century, these new approaches are increasingly being supported by a wide variety of leading practitioners, authorities, and institutions — public, private and participatory — in many parts of the world.

Despite this undeniable progress however, this approach is still heavily outmatched in many cities and parts of the world, in part because it advocates different approaches which are often regarded with doubt or suspicion by more conservative interests.

Fortunately there are a growing number of people, programs and institutions in different parts of the world that have got the message and are leading the charge with these new approaches: strategies and measures which are far better matched with the very different, historically unique and highly stringent requirements of this new century. One of the goals of this first-stage project is simply to identify the leading groups and approaches.

The goal of this open collaborative project is to initiate a constructive dialogue among the people and organizations around the world who know the problems and possibilities best, to see if we can come to some sort of creative vision of what if any best next steps might be.

These first stages are being taken in hand by the New Mobility Partnerships as a public contribution — and in doing this we note the sense of high emergency associated with this project that is driven by not only the long understood needs for radical transportation reform in our cities, but also and above all by the utmost urgency of the climate issues and just behind them the ever more pressing problems of energy supply, security and prices. It is for these reasons that this project takes on particular urgency and importance.

The project started to take shape in Spring 2008 with a series of exchanges between Sue Zielinski Managing Director of the Sustainable Mobility (SMART) program of the University of Michigan and Eric Britton of the New Mobility Partnerships in preparation for a high level brainstorming public/private conference on “New Mobility: The Emerging Transportation Economy” in which the idea was being turned around that our present information and “knowledge recuperation” tools were not keeping up with the urgent challenges we are presently facing. Britton was asked to lead a presentation and discussion on this during the 12 June 2008 conference, eventually entitled “Reinventing the Wheel (But not all by ourselves”.

The discussion was well received and eventually gave birth to this first stage project probe.

Basic principles

This project is defined by the following basic considerations and principles:

1. We are losing the climate war in a very big way – and we don’t need to.

2. We are losing the fossil fuel, food, and resource wars-and we don’t need to lose them either.

3. Transportation accounts for on the order of 20% of the climate problem — more in the case of some of the others.

4. More than half of the world population today live in cities — with more pouring in every day.

5. The vast majority of these people are poorly served by the existing transportation arrangements – and most the plans and projects in the pipeline offer zero prospect of the fundamental structural improvements that are needed.

6. A growing number of institutions and programs trying to make targeted contributions to deal with these challenges –some with fair resources and broad backing, most however working on bare bones budgets.

7. These programs and the people who make them up communicate with each other and collaborate with each other in a number of ways – but there is every reason to step up both by several orders of magnitude if we are to have a chance to rectify these fundamental planet and life threatening problems.

8. Communications and computer technologies offers the possibility to better network these programs, institutions and the people working with them – at low cost and very quickly.

9. The more unified, more deeply seated networking and sharing approach that would come out of these greatly heightened communications arrangements would improve their chances, individually and collectively, at getting to grips with the underlying challenges.

10. This project has the mission of opening up the dialogue that is needed to advance this very specific component of the sustainability agenda.

Dividend: This deepened and more universally accessible knowledge environment is for sure going to open up new project and service opportunities for entrepreneurs, both public, private and volunteer.

Some preliminary observations on this:

1. There is a huge amount of activity going on in this field (new mobility) in many places, though it is widely spread out, extremely varied in quality, quantity and focus, and at the present state of the art not really handy for consultation.

2. To use a common metaphor: we need to find ways to connect the silos.

3. But if one is to do anything at all in this area, we must have a firm understanding of how people go about accessing and putting all this to work in this fast-paced new century. How much detail do they need?

4. How can we bring it to them in layers, tree like structures which give them a bit of information to get started but which then permit them to start to burrow into the topic without having to lose track of all that went before.

5. If we are looking for an analogy, what about the need for getting together to invent some kind of 21st century Dewey Decimal system to allow us to access the contents of our worldwide library.?

6. There is very definitely a “new tools” vector that is worthy of closest attention. Most of us today are working with what in fact is a pretty old tool set (Moore’s Law still holds) — but the fact is that there are amazing new communications and linking tools available/needed that we should be putting to work.

7. Certainly we need to include full access not only to web sites, news groups, blogs, print in its variations, past and planned events in our areas of interest, but also to films, videos, sound, and images, as well as to games and other learning and playing devices that can be useful to sharpen the mind and bring up new perspectives. And 21st century communications options (full range thereof). In all this, if we are looking for models we would be consummately dumb not at least to try to understand by analogy what a “Google”, “Skype’, “Wikipedia”, and even “Facebook”, “LinkedIn”, “YouTube”, etc. new tools approach to this might give.

8. As we see it, there is both an information and an education-communications function to be served in our field. We need better working links between the main players: public sector players, researchers, local government, public interest groups and industry. But we also need much tighter linkages and let’s call it “cultural consonance” with the media, old and new.

9. One stark reality is that if you look down our first listing here, you will note that each of these groups is extremely busy and very focused. They have their mandates, schedules, and responsibilities to deliver – all putting tough claims on their time and resources to do anything else. So whatever we come up with is going to have to fit in this tight environment.

10. And unless someone can convince me to the contrary, I for one would be quite opposed to the idea of setting up some sort of one more staffed program for this. I see this as an open collaborative venture with everyone pitching in, and someone very smart and capable coming up with some new cross-cutting software link and search solutions.

11. Finally the sense of urgency. The transport sector accounts for on the order of 20% of all greenhouse gases. We have the means to reduce this contrition at least when it comes to transport in cities by several percent each year, but we are not doing it because we have not made the strong case that is needed to sway policy maker and public attention. This project could be a great help in this creating the necessary now concerns for change.

To conclude: This is an important topic and we have at least the intellectual means and the tools needed to start to deal with it. What is needed is the resources to get it started and then step by step advanced as shown to be necessary and useful.

You know what we really need? It’s someone who is willing to step forward and take on the task of becoming the DARPA of New Mobility. To shepherd the amazing discovery of an information highway that this time will carry and connect both people and electrons.

Who is going to have the foresight to take this lead?

What next?

We thought that a good first step to open up the silos and hopefully in parallel get some conversations going as to how to deal with these changes, that we would see if we could get together to build a combined search engine that would allow anyone with access to the net to scan ALL the resources and on line databases of all the groups and sources that we are able to identify. This lead us as a first step to work on something we called “Knoogle” — KNOwledge goOGLE. Let’s have a quick look.

Knoogle – A combined search engine tailored to do (a part of) the job

Knoogle New Mobility 1.2 is the first iteration of a power search engine specifically tailored to help policy makers, local government, researchers, NGOs, activists, consultants, concerned citizens and the media keep up efficiently with the work and plans of the leading groups, programs and sources leading the field of sustainable transport and sustainable cities, worldwide.

Knoogle is a free product of the New Mobility Agenda and the collaborative New Mobility Knowledge Environment: aimed at better linking a world-wide learning community in support of urgent, climate-driven transport reform in cities.

We invite you to test our in-process Knoogle 1.2 combined search engine to view the results of a quick unified scan based on your selected key words, combing through more than one thousand selected institutions, programs and sources in thirty countries that we view as leading the way in their work and
competence in our heavily challenged sector world-wide.

• Click here: to go to and use Knoogle New Mobility 1.1.

Examples of increasing coordination and interaction

We saw some interesting examples of this beginning to come on line with much more force over 2009. We shall be identifying them in the coming weeks and months in World Streets.

For more on this collaborative project, click here.

Get involved. Be part of it.

Eric Britton,
Editor