It was good to read this. I didn’t know you were so diligent at getting the history and roots of these terms documented.

I would suggest adding:

“complete streets” which is so ‘hot’ over here. I also like the idea, more radical, of “naked streets’ (somewhat like “woonerf” but for _main_ streets).

For the “pedestrian” experience, add “eyes on the street,” “walkability,” “warrants” (those diabolical tests that traffic engineers use to determine which places formal pedestrian crosswalks are needed)

“85th Percentile” the way to determine the speed limit for a road, which means that it is too fast for 85-percent of drivers, and then the police will not ticket drivers unless they are going more than 20% over the limit.

You have “hierarchy of roads” but do not have a hierarchy (or “green hierarchy”) of modes: walking, cycling, transit, shared cars, private cars.

Also. you have a typo in the 2nd para. after the second list: “board principles” instead of “broad principles.”

Chris Bradshaw

On 06/05/2013 7:27 AM, World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities wrote: > WordPress.com > Eric Britton, editor posted: “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 > traditio” >

I’ve recently started contributing to the Appropedia project, e.g. http://www.appropedia.org/Transport_informatics . Appropedia’s a bit different to WP, partly because it deliberately support people’s current projects as well as encyclopaedic content, and also has an explicit orientation towards Sustainable Development and Appropriate Technology.

I’d certainly appreciate help improving any of the transport pages there (http://www.appropedia.org/Portal:Transport) – I’m thinking that later on it’d be good to migrate the ‘enclopaedic’ part of any new content over to Wikipedia. E.g. I notice WP’s page on the public transport data standard GTFS is pretty weak currently.

Potrebbe Ti piacerebbe scrivere un po ‘di Haiku in italiano, raccontando l’interno personale dell’esperienza trasporto? Altro su questo a http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/category/inside-world/

1. The problem is rarely “gridlock”. It is the geographical pattern of diurnal traffic into concentrated destinations and out again. The contemporary problem is created by the concentration of traffic on a limited “freeway” network. This focuses the traffic flows on a quite small part of the total road network. One project jams the next bottleneck ad infinitum, but it is far from a full and dispersed “grid”.

2. Traffic at high densities is an a priori indication of the demand for trips in those particular space-time patterns. The paradox is that “demand” seems to increase with “price” as experienced by each tripmaker. It has been pointed out that this is really a misapprehension of what is the demand and what the supply “curve” in this case of joint externalities where there is neither an adequate pricing mechanism nor a market demand-supply relation. It is simply a Tragedy of the Commons in which the primary public role is to provide more commons to exploit, ad infinitum.

3. It is well known that the difference in traffic volume between an acceptable and at-capacity level of service on roads is about 7%. So by reducing 7% of peak demand (not even total road demand) we could turn complete at-capacity stalled traffic into an acceptable flow. That is the flow physics, and no other analysis is necessary to indicate that.

4. The converse of trying to increase capacity even by 7% is ultimately fuitile for the very reasons that existing capacity is congested.

5. While tripmakers of al demographics are caught in delay, our policies are basically subsidies to the greatest consumers of common resources. On a marginal-cost basis, William Vickrey long ago pointed out that we are paying on the order of $100,000 to each of the 7% exhausting the capacity of roads when capacity is increased. This is a policy scandal.

‘Then she drew the curtains down
And said, “When will you ever learn
That what happens there beyond the glass
Is simply none of your concern?

‘God has given you but one heart
You are not a home for the hearts of your brothers
And God don’t care for your benevolence
Anymore than he cares for the lack of it in others”‘. (ibid)

— Although I like to think we have good reason to counter that!

“That may be very well, I said
But watch the one fallin’ in the street
See him gesture to his neighbors
And see him trampled beneath their feet

All outward motion connects to nothin’
For each is concerned with their immediate need
Witness the man reachin’ up from the gutter
See the other one stumblin’ on who can not see

Read more: Nick Cave & The Bad Seed – As I Sat Sadly By Her Side Lyrics

1. I was surprised to see no reference to Ivan Illich and his ideas as contained in energy and equity. Mobility is a consumption (of space) that creates inequity. Since spatial consumption is joint, the problem is like that of other common pool resources, and a key issue in equity is conservation of the resource.

2. The typology of equities is demographic and focused on the attributes of people. When we consider space and its consumption via mobility, geography itself is a basis of equity. specific case is how resources are transferred among places of various geogrpahical attributes. We know that in general resources are transferred out of dense/transit-oriented places to sparse auto-oriented places. The cross-subsidies to low-volume roads is something that would not be tolerated for rail. I conducted one of the few detailed studies (for New York State in 1979) showing the specific cross-transfers by transport program for all the metro areas and the non-metro area. The result is simply that the largest metro areas are sources that drain to all smaller areas. We disinvest in our densest areas. Most of the demogrpahic equity problems follow. This is not to ignore the rural-immobile issue, one that I was quite involved with in past decades when transit demonstration programs attended to the issue.

We see the force principle at work in Cyprus – tending to equity in wealth distribution, via radical appropriation of property – the market force that created disparity in the first place – through greed of a few.

Most humans, by nature, are not greedy. However, throughout the ages, greed philosophies of a few have proved quite capable of causing temporary distortion and mayhem until harmony is once again restored by natural evolution.

Thanks. If I know I can test here and share the results with you.

In the meantime, you may want to try this: Contact what you get when you call up (a) http://worldstreets.org and (2) http://equitytransport.wordpress.com/? Is there a notable difference?

Best regards,

Eric Britton

I couldn’t agree with you more. The car has not just “freed” people from the older mix-and-match proposition of modes we once had, but it has denigrated the components of that “bouquet.” Walking is harder due to uncrossable streets and feelings of insecurity resulting from lack of “eyes on the street.” Cyclists feel threatened by “danger from behind.” Transit users face longer and longer waits and walks. Taxis are more and more expensive and regulated.

The car user-owner also benefits from subsidies, cross-subsidies (from users of other modes and other taxpayers), and rules (zoning requiring every building to have “plentiful” parking) that forces the same costs on non-car-owners/users.

The “bouquet” also suffers from poor connectibility, which includes long wait times, poor information, and unreliability. These are all symptoms of their decline in the face of reduced demand, and systemic neglect by government, not to mention inequality, in which these modes are stamped with a stigma that is tied to its major user groups: poor, elderly, disabled, children, ill/infirm, visitors, and ‘sympicists’ (“PED-CIVS”). Yes, mobile technology promises to reverse this problem.

The market approach to transportation will bring a fresh breath of fairness and will ensure that demand will better match supply (see Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking”) — although no one should pay for his first one-square metre of space and 5 km/h speed (or less) or to “park” on a bench or building ledge, but only if the traveler wants more space or speed. The confusing rules over transfers will be overcome by simply charging by distance, speed, and congestion factors. This will allow different operators to function cheek-by-jowl and not have to negotiate complex revenue-sharing schemes (which has even hurt single-operator transit by imposing unlimited access for90 minutes or 30 days.

I would add “valet carsharing” to this “bouquet,” in which those with the needs or means can summon a vehicle to be brought to them and then taken away afterwards. This could be provided by the carsharing company with individuals riding folding electric scooters (stowable anywhere in the car or a locker). Later, the service could be provided by self-driving cars, which would allow the “valet” to also be the “chauffeur.” The technology also should be able to provide an on-the-fly ridesharing that will be close to transit in feel, but remove the waiting or the need to be at a specific place like a bus stop.

One short thought on this is that a drive towards a more equitable transport system, involving more use of shared/common modes, at least to some extent interacts with the inequity in broader society. I.E. given the need for transfers at stations, then we need to improve public space to make these more pleasant for all citizens. And dare I say it, this includes the difficult topics like vagrancy/begging that sometimes goes on in such places – and the social & economic reasons behind these, and how to at least ameliorate them.

I’m not saying that these broader issues should in any way be a barrier to getting started on a more equitable transportation system – and perhaps the effort to do so is one of the ways these broader problems start getting addressed.

1. A system such that everyone, whether they currently use cars or not, would be better off than now.

2. A system such that those who choose not to use a car would (usually) be better off than those who do.

I am sure that 1 is possible. I am far from sure that 2 is possible, unless we can bite the bullet and price people out of their cars.

Here is an analogy. In a field inhabited by lions and lambs, it would be better to be a lion than a lamb. If a means were devised that would enable a lion to turn into a lamb there would be few takers. But this doesn’t mean that everyone wouldn’t be better off as a lamb. In fact, it is well known that the carrying capacity of an ecosystem is greater for herbivores than for carnivores, which means that a lamb-only field would be more sustainable.

think twice before
move slow and light, faster
Go together

CityzenCar – on partage plus qu’une voiture

Kind regards,
Angelo Meuleman – Taxistop (carpooling – car-sharing)

Whatever we do
Surely the planet will survive
Doubts about mankind