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

crowd-source-photoAs 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, bureaucracies, laws, 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, contradictory, time-lagged 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. Continue reading