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.

Thinking about Equity-Based Transport Systems: Get Ready to Embrace Complexity (or Get Off the Bridge)

As is or at least should by now be well known, a transportation “system” is well more than a collection of largely free-standing bits of infrastructure, modes, links, agencies, institutions, operators and more, concerning which decision scan be taken on a piecemeal basis. .  It is in fact a textbook example of a disorganized complex system, or more specifically a vast, chaotic but ultimately manageable ecosystem.  And if it is our ambition — which it should be — to construct, or rather reconstruct, our city transport systems into functional high-performing sustainable ecosystems. it can help to build up our understanding of the process in steps.

Hacking Sustainability: Part 2

Information + Choice + Feedback:
The basic idea is familiar: i.e., putting that smart phone in our pocket to work to help us calibrate and understand a range of inter-connected variables related to our mobility choices. An app to handle not one but two sets of related challenges: personal and environmental.

Getting outside that box (which may require being just a bit unreasonable)

Once we are cozily set up in our box — a box of course that we can neither see nor really appreciate (What box?) — we become accustomed to thinking of things comfortably wedged within our invisible container  as “that’s the way things are”.  And from there it is a very small step to become  a pragmatically “reasonable person”.  To which I can only quote Bernard Shaw when he said so long ago (with social justice and the emancipation of women firmly in the middle of his sites): The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.  Let’s see if Preston Schiller can help us to get outside the box of the automobile.