NOW!! 17 plus 1 reasons why I am prudently optimistic about the World Climate / Mobility / Work Transition for 2021/22

Shortlist of on-going Transformative Realities and Trends

One of the great recompenses of having watched the sustainable transportation and related technology developments evolve over the course of several decades, is that if one takes the time to step back and scan the evidence for pattern breaks, one can readily spot a certain number of  trends, fundamental structural changes, quite a few of which bode well for a different and better future for transport in and around cities. Here are a handful of the fundamental underlying changes which I have spotted over the last decades on the mobility beat and which I would like to share with you this sunny COVID morning.  Let’s start with a simple listing and then go on to brief comments in an attempt to clarify.

 – PS. G. K. Chesterton put it like this: “If a thing is worth doing . . . it’s worth doing badly”  . (We’ll leave it to you to sort that one out)

To fix Sustainable Mobility: Ensure FULL Gender Parity in all Planning, Decision and Investment Fora (QED)

Every day is a perfect occasion for World Streets to announce publicly, loudly and yet once again our firm belief that the most important single thing that our society, our nations and our cities could do to increase the fairness and the effectiveness of our transportation arrangements would be to make it a matter of the law that all decisions determining how taxpayer money is invested in the sector should be decided by councils that respect full gender parity. We invite you to join us in this challenge and make it one of the major themes of sustainable transport policy worldwide in the year immediately ahead.

Town in Iceland Paints 3D Zebra Crosswalk To Slow Down Speeding Cars

In the small fishing town of Ísafjörður, Iceland, an exciting development in road safety has just popped up – almost literally. A new pedestrian crossing has been painted that appears to be 3D by way of a cleverly-detailed optical illusion.

What is a Transport User Group? (And why are they so important for your city)

World Streets has committed to carry out a series of articles, in cooperation with informed on-the-spot collaborators, looking into various aspects of transport user groups, on the grounds that they are increasingly emerging  in many cities around the world as important potential players in the uphill struggle to sustainable transportation, sustainable cities and sustainable lives.

Throughout  most of the 20^th century transportation decisions were strictly made by government administrations and elected politicians, more often than not in cooperation with interests representing industrial and financial partners supplying infrastructure, vehicles, electronics and services. In most places these were closed loops in which the public was occasionally, at best, invited to approach the table and then asked to share their views on the specifics alternative proposals as prepared and presented by the various administrations and agencies, but for the most part were excluded from the actual planning and decision process. They were at most shadow players.

However this is starting to change, to the extent that in many cities in recent years these groups are increasingly becoming important players in the planning, decision and investment process.

Transport minimization: Bridging needs, time and space in different ways

The TMAPP Planners Toolbox:

Transport/Mobility/Access/ Proximity/’Presence’

To take full advantage of the fundamental structural differences between Old and New Mobility, it can help to reflect on the five necessary different steps of analysis and action suggested by the expression TMAPP – which sets out five alternative views or ways of bridging space, which of course is what transportation is supposed to be all about. These are the essential building blocks of a full-function sustainable transport plan for your city.  If you have not integrated the best of each of these essential steps into your plan, it is time for a bit of continuing education.

ON LUUD SCHIMMELPENNINK AND SOCIAL INNOVATION – GREAT IDEAS HAVE WINGS

World Streets is proposing to support the nomination of  the prolific Dutch environmentalist, industrial designer, provocateur Ludd Schimmelpennink  for a major international environmental award for his life-time contributions to sustainable development, sustainable cities and sustainable lives. (Our timetable for this submittal gives us one week from today, 10 November, to finalise the nomination.)

We invite the readers of World Streets to have a look and, if you will, get back to us with your suggestions to (a) edit, expand and improve the nomination whose draft follows.  And once you have had a look and thought about it, you are invited to join us in supporting this unusual nomination. If so, it would be great to have your name, position and organisation( if any), city and country.  And should you wish to add some brief remarks (less than 50 words max.), please do and our earnest editor will do his best.

Our Personal Choices — and Our (un)Sustainable Lives

I don’t think we can buy the argument anymore that we deserve special dispensation just because we think what we  —  the “elite” — are doing is worthwhile. 

Let’s see. At last count there were already well more than seven billion of us sharing this suddenly very small planet. And let’s say, just to get a crude handle on this, that each of us, whether in Mali or Malibu, makes something like a hundred “personal planet action choices” each day, leading to specific actions which when we had them all up have quite a potential impact on our earth.

IS WORLD STREETS DOING ITS JOB? (We asked one hundred of our readers for their views.)

And one hundred and one responded:

Some World Streets readers

17 plus 1 reasons why I am prudently optimistic about the Climate/Mobility Transition for 2019-2020

Shortlist of Transformative Realities and Trends

One of the great recompenses of having watched the sustainable transportation and related technology developments evolve over the course of several decades, is that if one takes the time to step back and scan the evidence for pattern breaks, one can readily spot a certain number of  trends, fundamental structural changes, quite a few of which bode well for a different and better future for transport in and around cities. Here are a handful of the fundamental underlying changes which I have spotted over the last decades and which I would like to share with you this morning.

Let’s start with a simple listing and then go on to brief comments in an attempt to clarify.

TRANSITION STRATEGIES: Selected Wikipedia checklist of key terms, concepts and references

Intended as a handy research aid, checklist and reminder for students, researchers and others digging into the Slow City and related technical and policy challenges. A certain familiarity with these concepts is desirable; more than that I would say essential.

It is particularly important that those responsible for planning and policy be comfortable with these concepts. Anyone prepared to work in the field will already have familiarity with, say,  9 out of 10 of the concepts identified here.  It concerns the stuff of sustainable transport, sustainable mobility and sustainable cities.  (I would draw your attention particularly to those entries that are marked with two  asterisks * * which touch on some of the more subtle and essential components of a sustainable transport policy.)

From the beginning in the late eighties the New Mobility Agenda was conceived as a shared space for communications and didactic tools zeroing in on our chosen topic from a number of angles,  and over the last eight years World Streets has  continued in this tradition. I hope that what follows may be useful to some of you.  As you will see, I think it is an important and powerful tool — which those of us who care can help shape and put to work for the good cause.

How much can you trust Wikipedia — and what you can do about it

A Short History of Car Free Days (Weeks, Months, Cities): Origins, Timeline, Progress

Toledo (Spain), 22 Sept. 1994 . Ciudades Accessibles (Accessible Cities) Conference
“Every day is a great day to take a few cars off the street and think about it.”

Here is how the Car Free Days movement got started and has taken shape over the last quarter century (time flies).  This is the second in a series of articles which we update and post annually just prior to the September rush to get the latest batch of Car Free Day/New Mobility Agenda projects off the ground. We hope that these pieces and the references you find here are going to prove useful to those responsible for making a success of their Days in 2019 and beyond. Getting a CFD right and making it a real success is no easy task — good knowledge of what has worked and not worked in the past should serve you well.

What about women as cyclists? Dilatory reflections, notes and world-wide perspectives from Nijmegen ECF 2017

DRAFT FOR PEER REVIEW AND COMMENT

What about women as cyclists at Velo-city 2017?

Benoit Beroud, Mobility Designed for All consultant at Mobiped, attended, the World Cycling Congress, which occurred in Nijmegen (Netherlands) last June. He shares his notes and comments with World Streets after reflection some inspiring thoughts  about women and cycling in their day-to-day lives.

“First impression was given by pictures of the website, program (see above), and flyers of the conference: set of various women cycling. And it is not a misleading advertisement.”

draft for intl womean’s day 8 march??

To fix Sustainable Transport . . . Ensure Full Gender Parity in all Decision and Investment Fora  

And please note this: it is the ONLY way to get this important job done! To get the much needed results we need a hammer, not a paint brush. This leadership function cannot be passively sub-contracted to the other sex. World Streets and the New Mobility Agenda have since 1988 been vigorous proponents of full gender parity in all planning and decision counsel. In this section you will find a number of the articles that we have published arguing in favor of gender parity in recent years.

You may also wish to check out the supporting Facebook site here . * A good place to start is here – “To fix Sustainable Transport: Ensure Full Gender Parity in all Decision and Investment Fora (QED) “
_______________________________________________________

Supporting References and Tools:
An open, self-organized multi-media toolset and extension of the original Dgroups site. Designed to complement, work in parallel with and not as a substitute for the original listserv. Over the last 13 years this open collaborative program has slowly pieced together an interesting set of tools and reporting media in support of the Women, Transport and Leadership (WTL) initiative. Here is how the toolset looks as of this date.

• Gatnet (Gender and Transport )1.0. https://dgroups.org/worldbank/gatnet/
• WTL 2.0 collaborative blog: https://gatnet.wordpress.com/.
• Gender issues on the Planners Bookshelf- https://goo.gl/wkWIDJ
• Gender issues Universal Search – https://goo.gl/EOjBpI . (Extends Dgroups Search engine)
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/groups/gatnet/
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8123470
• Twitter – https://twitter.com/e_gatnet
• Open Library – https://goo.gl/PiRO4Z
• Scholarly articles – https://goo.gl/vsI9eQ
• News – https://goo.gl/vMM3FY
• Videotec Library– https://goo.gl/6IdcHR
• Photo Library – https://www.facebook.com/groups/gatnet/photos
• GTL Member Map – https://goo.gl/FVaDGj
• The faces of Gatnet 2.0 235 Members – https://goo.gl/1dRMoY

PS. Is it easy to organize a conference or event on the topic of sustainable mobility and at the same time ensure full gender parity. Our field is substantially dominated until now (numerically if not qualitatively) by males – and that of course is one of the reasons why we are for the most part not doing a very good job at the thing we need to fix. It takes an effort on the part of the organizers to ensure full gender parity (me included by the way), but once you get the hang of it, it becomes natural and indeed satisfying. It is a higher state of social awareness and democracy. Now of course this does not solve the problems, but it gives us a great starting place.

So put this toward the top of your wish list for the rest of this year Gents. You may be uncomfortable to start with, but soon you’ll understand that you are doing the right thing.

Questions and comments to volunteer admin Eric Britton at eric.britton@ecoplan.org | Skype newmobility | tel. +336 5088 0787

Machine Translations for 2018 New Mobility Master Classes — (And other uses . . . with an invitation)

In the context of our 2018 online educational outreach program on New Mobility Master Classes – of which you can check out the initial work plan at https://wp.me/s1fsqb-7777 and https://www.facebook.com/NewMobilityMasterClass/ — we decided to look closely with the help of a handful of our colleagues working in different language environments at the potential for using Google Translate’s offer of immediate machine translation of your web site and with one click in to close to one hundred languages.

MANAGING THE SAFE CITY TRANSITION: . . . . . Notes for a Thinking Exercise . . . . .

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

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

THE TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE ZOMBIE: (It never sleeps.)

— Get ready for WTPP Volume 23.3&4 December 2017,

In which an even dozen outstanding international transport experts take on (and take apart) the Transport Infrastructure Zombie, limb by painful  limb.

Exhibit A: BAN THE BIKE! HOW CITIES MADE A HUGE MISTAKE IN PROMOTING CYCLING

Safe cycling?

 

“City politicians around the world are in a race to make their cities “bike-friendly.” The more they succeed, the nastier things will get. . .  Cycling lanes consume more space than they free up, add to pollution and drain the public purse”

Mr. Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, Source: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-ban-the-bike-how-cities-made-a-huge-mistake-in-promoting-cycling

Let’s have a look at what Mr. Solomon has to offer when he challenges our thinking on these issues. Your comments as always are more than welcome.

Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Fall 2017 Newsletter

This carefully compiled seasonal report from Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute is a fine tool and up to date source guide for researchers and policy makers worldwide. We are pleased to present it in its entirety here, together with references you will find handy to take these entries further.

The New Circular Economy: Vision, Strategy, Policy, Practice – An Introduction

– Eric Britton, ISG, Paris, 15 November 2017.

An Open Collaborative Policy Research Program

Making some progress in exploring the Circular Economy/Public Policy interface, in the context of our master classes and advisory program on Sustainable Development, Economy and Democracy. Here is how things are starting to shape up at this still early point.