– – – – – – > Working draft of 1 May 2020
WORLD STREETS is betting its future on the coming immediate-term transition led by certain ambitious, responsible cities, nations, organizations and citizens in different parts of the world to come together to break the downward pattern of ever-increasing climate stress — and before the challenge to plan and execute highly aggressive near-term initiatives aimed at sharply cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the mobility sector. And doing all this while working with proven tools, policies and strategies that harness cost-effective, readily available, measures, technologies, operational and management competence. Our job is to support them as best we can.
CONTEXT/KEYWORDS:: Climate/Emergency Cities/Mobility Vision/Strategy Streets/Cars Time/Space Private/Shared Equity/Women Action/Manage
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- You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller
THE 2020 FIVE PERCENT CLIMATE/MOBILITY CHALLENGE
One of the originalities of this approach is its fierce concentration on near-term initiatives and results, i.e., what can be targeted and accomplished in the year directly ahead to reduce GHG emissions by a targeted five percent. The long-time horizons that are being promised for achieving major cuts in the environmental load are, in our view, not all that helpful. The far future gets heavily discounted and fails to penetrate in many minds. Our cities and our planet badly need near-term results and a continuing sharp reversal of the installed the downward trends.
And for that we need to create a new model. There is no reason to wait any longer, and every reason to attack the climate challenge immediately. And we are here to support this mobility revolution. The idea is to be judged by the announced public targets and achieved results in the year immediately following the Challenge program startup, 2020.
The power of a new mobility concept depends not on how well it solves a given, targeted problem. But on how many problems it (partly) solves. – Marko Te Brömmelstroet
MORE WITH LESS: Here are a couple of acronyms that are central to these strategies — TDM, ICT, VKT, TSM, ITS, MaaS, HOV, LOV, LOS, PBS, . . . among a long list of others – that you are already familiar with and will see developed in the articles, pages and references that follow here. Ways in which to do more with less. And . . . / Better / Quicker / Cheaper. To get a better feeling for this, check out in particular our TDM Primer at https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/tdm-primer/.
COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING: By posting the key steps of their CHALLENGE project in the STREETS LAB project section, from the first organizational and planning stages and then on through the fine-tuning, results and proposed adjustments for the 2020 projects we open up a group learning process. Also encouraging both private and open comments and suggestions on posted projects.
ECOSYSTEM(S) : This is the most subtle and demanding aspect of this challenge project. For a well-prepared program, many sharp reductions can be achieved in a matter of months or a couple of years, as opposed to decades (or never). The great art lies in how we prepare them and then knit them all together . . . so as to effectively redefine the entire underlying mobility ecosystem. As our Dutch colleague Marco Te Brömmelstroet put it so well: “The power of a new mobility concept depends not on how well it solves a problem . . . but on how many problems it (partly) solves “. We can take that as a timely reminder.
BETTER CHOICES: HOW TO. In two ways: first not by constraining and admonishing, but by inviting and offering better choices and not punitive measures forced down the throat of an unwilling public. As t/politician William Butler Yeats put it so long ago: “the role of education is not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire.” Because we know that the way to make this more than difficult transition is to be lively, surprising and to find the soft way . . . together.
WATCHING bRIEFS: OTHER KEY CONCEPTS TO DEVELOP HERE:
- Watching Briefs
- Climate of Change
- Twelve Dialogues
- Children’s projects
- Youth activism
- Full gender parity
- The New Seniors
- Active mobility and street redesign
- Car-Free City Transition Strategies.
- etc. (See Watching Briefs)
INVITATION: Readers of World Streets, colleagues, researchers, students and public interest groups around the world are cordially invited to join early discussions and shaping of a proposed open collaborative climate emergency initiative, aiming to identify and demonstrate by concrete examples ways in which greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the mobility sector can be reduced by a whopping 5% in Year 1. And then again in Years 2, 3, 4… etc. (Learning by doing.)
WORLD STREETS CLIMATE EMERGENCY TOOLBOX (Links to be completed, verified)
(1) Start – http://bit.ly/2SGXWNu
(2) Global Climate Emergency context – http://bit.ly/2PcmrTG
(3) Climate Change programs underway — http://bit.ly/2EwBwK7
(4) World Streets Master Classes — http://bit.ly/2YkwtUH (needs updating).
– World news — http://bit.ly/2YBfWwE — Images/photos http://bit.ly/2qGyhf6
(5) International Advisory Panel – https://wp.me/psKUY-4yh
(6) Strategies – https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/strategies/
(7) Planners’ Bookshelf – (See https://yhoo.it/2YbZwdp for example to follow)
(8) The Third Force – https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/thethirdforce/
(9) Visual evidence and Clues – http://bit.ly/2T6Ee1k
(10) Twitter – https://twitter.com/worldstreets
(11) Full Gender Parity – http://bit.ly/2ViIR5G
(12) TDM Primer at https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/tdm-primer
(13) Invitation – https://wp.me/psKUY-5vw
STEAL THIS PROJECT It is our firm hope that this open collaborative grassroots initiative will not only bring some much-needed fresh ideas to the on-going climate agenda, but that others will come in with their own hopefully even better ideas, skills, projects and resources, and do better yet in the search for those vital near term improvements and changes so much needed. World Streets will follow, support and report on this wave of new thinking and action as best we can. Teamwork!
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About the program coordinator:
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CONTACTS: Email. climate@newmobility.org . Tel. +336 5088 0787. WAP +1 310 919 4292. Skype: newmobility Project coordinator: Eric Britton at http://bit.ly/2Ti8LsX
WORLD STREETS __ A New Mobility Action Plan for 2022 