Op-Ed: On-street parking fees despite zero public transport?

Can on-street parking fees really help places with poor public transport?

 – Paul Barter, Adjunct Associate Professor, LKY School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

I was asked this many times in Pune, India, while I was there on mission three weeks ago*. Parking is a hot topic in this Maharashtra city of about 5 million people because many Pune streets have extreme parking problems and because the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has a new and progressive draft parking policy awaiting approval. However, public transport in Pune remains unappealing for vehicle owners. Hence the question.

The short answer is yes! 

Post Velo-City 2017 Op-Ed: On the need to re-connect cycling discourses with its core values

–  Esther Anaya-Boig,  Doctoral researcher at Imperial College London

I have just returned from the latest Velo-city Global Cycling Summit organized this year in Arnhem-Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The best part of the conference experience for me was that it gave me an opportunity to catch up with so many old friends and making new ones who share my deep interest in cycling as a mobility form and as a social act.

I appreciate the hard work and good intentions of the many many people who have contributed and made this event possible. However upon considerable reflection on what I saw and heard during the three days of the conference and associated events, I would now like to share some views and reactions, with all due respect of course.

SLOW CITY STRATEGIES: START HERE

FOR THE RECORD AND IN BRIEF:

A Slow City is an urban development vision and quantifiable target, the first step of which is  (a) to reduce traffic accidents and their human and economic costs to zero  in the city, by (b) strategically slowing down traffic, over all the parts and the system as a whole. This gives the city a measurable target output (accident data and on-street and in-vehicle ITS feedback) for evaluation and management purposes,  and an innovative platform to link and serve other sustainable projects and programs which are consistent to the theme: reforms and improvements that are Better | Cheaper | Safer.

Invitation to the New Mobility Fine Arts Collection: Summer 2017 SLOW CITY PENANG: TIME TO TAKE A GOOD HARD LOOK

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SLOW CITY PENANG – AN INVITATION

From the New Mobility Fine Arts Collection, Summer 2017. From 1 July – 1 September

An online exhibit of shared photos, drawings, renderings, street art, child scribblings, videos, poems, proposed projects events . . . .illustrating these two very different sides of life in Penang: fast and slow. the good, the bad and the at times very ugly.

– See https://www.facebook.com/NewMobilityArts/ for details

The 2016 Civil Society Penang Sustainable Mobility Challenge: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

What were the weaknesses of our collaborative summer 2016 push

• Very few – terrific job. Most sincerely! But also, to be honest and strategic . . .

Transport Planning, Policy and Competence in Penang

CREDENTIALS AND EXPERIENCE OF MAJOR ACTORS  (IN BRIEF)

– Statement of Eric Britton to the WhatsApp forum,

Leading the way: Visionaries, scientists, heroes and builders

Late night thoughts on some of the creative thinkers who over the last five decades have, each in their own highly individual ways,  entirely reshaped  our views of  a just, efficient and sustainable city.

Not to be too aggressive here, but if you, as a planner, decision-maker, activist or student, are not familiar with the thinking and accomplishments of  a fair number  of these champions of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, then you have some important homework to do before you can really dig in, understand and make a contribution. And in each case the Wikipedia profiles provide only a preliminary introduction to get you started, along with a first round of  references to their work and contributions sufficient for you to start to understand their genius and contributions.

Let’s have a look at my personal shortlist of sustainability heroes, based entirel on A sample of people whom i have had the honor to know and work with. (You will no doubt have your on list, so please make it known and share them with slowcity@ecoplan.org.).

________________ SLOW CITY READER ________________ From the Archives of World Streets: 2008-2020

Useful background references from the archives of World Streets to lend a hand to planners, policy makers, researchers, NGOs, students, media and others concerned with the challenges of sustainable cities in general, and in particular those of calming traffic speeds in combination with other complementary measures to change, to improve  and to soften the face of  your city.

 25 Feb. 2018. Please note: Following to be updated to accommodate latest findings.

A Safe City Primer from the World Resources Institute ______________ THE NEED FOR SAFE SPEEDS ______________

Peripheral vision loss (grayed area) of driver at 70 kph on city street. Graphic by: WRI. Notice anything?

  Four Surprising Ways Slower Driving Creates Better Cities

Text extracts from article from TheCityFix of 9 May 2016.  Full text and excellent  didactic graphics at https://goo.gl/9tydC6

Protected: “WE ARE THE INVENTORS OF A NEW WORLD, MY SIR”

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INTRODUCING DESPACIO (QUIETLY/ SLOWLY/RELAX)

Car Free Day in Bogota Colombia 2016

Despacio is an international collaborative program out of Bogotá Colombia, established by Carlos Felipe Pardo and colleagues in Bogotá Colombia founded  in 2011, whose work spans three principal areas:

* Development and life cycle

* Urban-regional development

* Climate change, low carbon policies and emissions reduction

Organizing our thoughts on Slowth

Credit: Simphewe Nkwali (Eco-Mobiliy Johannesburg

The  Slow Movement) advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life’s pace. It began with Carlo Petrini‘s protest against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 1986 that sparked the creation of the slow food movement. Over time, this developed into a subculture in other areas, like the Cittaslow organisation for “slow cities”. The “slow” epithet has subsequently been applied to a variety of activities and aspects of culture.

What is  more important to you this morning?  That your trip is fast?  Or quick?

Toward a new paradigm for transport in cities: Let’s see what Carlos Pardo has to say

The construction of a well-defined, broadly accepted agenda for New Mobility  until the present time has been sadly lacking. But what we and a numb er of our international colleagues have managed to develop over the last two decades is a certain number of agreed basic principles spanning many different areas and kinds of operational situations, but somehow until now we have failed to put them all together into a well-defined, convincing operational and policy package. We think of this as the move toward a new paradigm for transport in cities – and it all starts with . . . slowing down.

Today I would like to extract and comment on some of the graphics and thoughts developed by our colleague Carlosfelipe Pardo in a presentation which he entitled “The psychology of urban mobility”. I have extracted from his presentation three sets of images which I would now like to present you and comment briefly. (For the full original presentation please click here.)

Slow City: In the beginning were the Provos (and the White Plans)

To understand Luud Schimmelpennink’s White Bicycle Plan, it helps to have a look at the broader context of values, philosophy and politics that were prevailing in Amsterdam at that time –  the Provos, a Dutch counterculture youth movement in the mid-1960s.

And if one concludes that this was more or less what was going on in other parts of Europe and North America, you would be right.  And a bit wrong. The Dutch were digging deeper. At least this part of Dutch society was.

The Slow City New Mobility Collaborative – First announcement (Testing the water)

The Slow City /New Mobility Collaborative is a joint venture launched in late 2016 by Luud Schimmelpennink (The Netherlands)) and Eric Britton (France/USA) as an open public interest forum building on their extensive international competence, experience and networks in the broad area of ecological, environmental and social innovation to improve quality of life in and around cities — and specifically in support of sustainable and equitable mobility and creative use of public space. The two principals have long collaborated on an ad hoc basis, and decided that the time has come for a forceful joint effort targeting the period 2017-2020, from the strategic objective of obtaining sharp reductions of transport-related effluents in support of the Paris COP 21 agreement  — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement

Proposal: a 2017 Amsterdam Brainstorming Slam on Slow Cities 

xCars (And are we losing our flair?)

From the xCar archives – https://www.facebook.com/groups/worldcarshare/ (218 members)

USA. Inventor John W. Pitts, pathological inventor, notable primarily for his attempts at building a flying car and actually get it off the ground, the “Sky Car”. Source: The Old Motor, http://theoldmotor.com

The “Sky Car” was powered a four-cylinder engine. It did get off the ground by roughly eight inches or so and the “flight” ended. It was obviously staged for the camera and unwisely located right next to a tree.