Safe City Strategies for bringing sustainable transport to your city .
The Seven Pillars
Category Archives: *Slow City 2020
Admittedly it may not be so easy to get a feel for what World Streets is supposed to be all about when you first check in here — since we have since 2009 published more than 1500 articles and twice that many graphics, photographs and illustrative short videos on a very large array of issues, approaches, countries and cultures. So to open up this virtual Pandora’s box of information and ideas for first-time readers we decided to cull about one percent of the contents to see if we could come up with a selection of diverse articles, most of them quite short, to try to give you a taste of the variety and quality of what goes on here. We call this our “Reader” and invite your comments, suggestions and eventual contributions to what is, above all, an open, collaborative and convergent environment.
SAFE CITY STRATEGIES : MANAGING THE TRANSITION. (Working notes for a 2021 Thinking Exercise)
Op-Ed. Why our cities must act as beacons for ambitious climate action
Source: https://www.climate-kic.org/opinion/cities-must-act-as-beacons-for-ambitious-climate-action/
Cities are a critical player in effective climate action, and many are already making headway where others are falling behind.
Will cities ultimately be viewed as the cause or solution to the global climate emergency? That seems to be the crossroads at which we now find ourselves, and it is a question which is either troubling or inspiring for city planners and mayors alike.
Cities are huge contributors to climate change, responsible for about 70 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions and yet they are also at the frontline of the impacts of floods, extreme heat and drought.
Research by scientists at the Crowther Lab predicted that 77 per cent of cities around the world will experience dramatic change in climate conditions over the next 30 years.
For us, the most effective response begins by helping cities embrace the essential role they play. Cities are a critical player in effective climate action,
- Continue reading – – > https://www.climate-kic.org/opinion/cities-must-act-as-beacons-for-ambitious-climate-action/
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About the World Streets Climate program coordinator:
Eric Britton
13, rue Pasteur. Courbevoie 92400 France
Bio: Founding editor of World Streets (1988), Eric Britton is an American political scientist, teacher, occasional consultant, and sustainability activist who has observed, learned, taught and worked on missions and advisory assignments on all continents. In the autumn of 2019, he committed his remaining life work to the challenges of aggressively countering climate change and specifically greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the mobility sector. He is not worried about running out of work. Further background and updates: @ericbritton | http://bit.ly/2Ti8LsX | #fekbritton | https://twitter.com/ericbritton | and | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbritton/ Contact: climate@newmobility.org) | +336 508 80787 (Also WhatApp) | Skype: newmobility.)
Women in transport: Reducing inequalities in smart mobility in Europe
Andree Woodcock, a Professor from Coventry University, tells us what we need to know about the H2020 TInnGO (Transport Innovation Gender Observatory) project that concerns the role of women in transport and the need to reduce inequalities in smart mobility. Source: Source: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/reducing-inequalities-in-smart-mobility/73408/
Why is this needed?
It has long been recognised that women (and other groups) are significantly marginalised in transport. Without research in this area, the transport revolution produced by smart mobility will continue to exclude women and ‘disadvantaged‘ groups (e.g. the elderly, those from lower-income backgrounds, with mobility, cognitive, sensory and communication difficulties). Commuting journeys are privileged by transport systems, over those related to home and social and healthcare. The complex, multilegged journeys by women and those in lower socio-economic groups are not modelled; therefore, future systems will perpetuate the same inequalities.
Recent analysis conducted by TInnGO shows that around 70% of the transport workforce are male and since 1945, only 7% of the transport ministers in TInnGO countries have been female. Gendered and non-inclusive discourses are already being used to promote smart mobility solutions, despite the fact that women most use and support sustainable transport. Clearly, this situation needs to be urgently addressed if the smart city agenda is to fulfil its promises of improving the quality of life for all people.
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Article continues: – https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/reducing-inequalities-in-smart-mobility/73408/
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.
McKinsey checks out Micromobility
In brief:
Micromobility is a category of modes of transport that are provided by very light vehicles such as electric scooters, electric skateboards, shared bicycles and electric pedal assisted, pedelec, bicycles. The primary condition for inclusion in the category is a gross vehicle weight of less than 500 kg. Additional conditions are the provision of a motor, primary utility use, and availability as a shared service. (Thanks WP.) Note: Additional graphics below purloined from the net. Creative Commons –
MxKinsey and Micromobility’s 15,000-mile checkup
January 2019 | Article By Kersten Heineke, Benedikt Kloss, Darius Scurtu, and Florian Weig Source and full text, graphics and links: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/micromobilitys-15000-mile-checkup
COSTS, BENEFITS AND HIATUS OF THE ORIGINAL PENANG TRANSPORT MASTER PLAN
Credit: Simphewe Nkwali (Eco-Mobiliy Johannesburg
* * * COLLABORATIVE THINKING EXERCISE (DRAFT 1) * * *
– Government of the people, by the people, for the people
Please have a look and, if interested, may we have your thoughts about these and other impact areas that in your view need to be taken into consideration in order to have a full and shared understanding of these impacts of the proposed and latest SDS Penang Transport Master Plan.
We need to be clear about this. The objective here is not to criticize or belittle the State’s efforts at improving the short-comings and potential of today’s transportation arrangements in Penang. Rather the goal is to provide open citizen feedback to their proposals to all levels of government, civil society and the public at large. As President Abraham Lincoln put it at a hard moment for history in America: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Your responses are welcome here or to penang@ecoplan.org. Thank you.
ON A SCALE OF 0-10: please show us your views concerning how the proposals, measures and their potential set out in the SDS PTMP do in the following legitimate areas of citizen interest and concern. Some of these are quite specialized as you will see as your work your way down the list, but don’t let that bother you. Just share your views with the items that strike your attention. With a careful eye to both long and short term impacts (say in the coming three years, 2018-2020).
* * * For latest version of SDS MP : http://pgmasterplan.penang.gov.my — See below the listing of the principal infrastructure projects proposed by the plan.
WHAT’S THIS? VÉLO’V! VÉLO’V?
And just in case you may not happen to know . . . back in early 2005, the City of Lyon, in close partnership with the firm JCDecaux (street furniture, outdoor advertising) , got together in a lively partnership and for the first time ever in a city anywhere on the planet decided to dump a couple of thousand “public bikes” onto the streets of a city, keep them working and see what happens. And they never looked back.
Archives: Road safety: A public health challenge (India)
India’s hurried quest for development and its disregard for road safety have resulted in a major public health problem that demands serious thought and action.
This article by Professor K.S. Jacob, which is central to the matters which bring us together here in the Safe City 2018 Challenge, originally appeared in the pages of The Hindu of 6 October 2010 and was reprinted immediately in our sister publication Streets of India. As with John Whitelegg’s prescient 1993 piece on Time Pollution which was published here on Monday of this week, this independent expert commentary on safe, or rather unsafe, streets helps us to better understand the realities we need to face on the streets of our cities. Continue reading
Who read World Streets where this morning?
The above map reports the locations of the 561 readers checking into World Streets over the last five days. (Of our total 7,280 registered readers as of this date.)
But what about them? Where are they coming from? And what do they read? Let’s have a look.
International Symposium on Road Safety Around the World: Future Concerns
19 March 2018. University of Chicago Center in Paris
ICoRSI 19 March Symposium Programme
The one day symposium is being sponsored by the Independent Council for Road Safety International (www.icorsi.org) when fourteen papers will be presented to focus on important theoretical and practical issues concerning road safety around the world. The papers have been specially prepared for wider dissemination after discussion at this symposium. A brochure including the details of the programme is attached.
The symposium should be of special interest to researchers and policy makers working on critical road safety issues internationally.
For general background on ICoRSI see https://www.icorsi.org. For full program: https://goo.gl/77WNLD
The presentations at the symposium will be recorded and used for public information. The papers presented at the ICoRSI International Symposium Road Safety Around the World: Future Concerns may be published separately after discussion at the symposium.
HOW MOBILE ARE WE AND HOW DID WE GET HERE? (2018 New Mobility Master Class: Draft for comment)
The mobility/growth paradigm (or the mobility complex)
– By John Whitelegg, extract from his book MOBILITY. A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future, Chapters 2 and 3. For more on the New Mobility Master Class program click here – https://goo.gl/BB2pPE
Mobility is most commonly measured, if at all, as total distance travelled per annum per capita in kilometres and/or total distance travelled per day per capita. There are other important dimensions e.g. number of trips made per day or number of destinations that can be accessed by different modes of transport in a defined unit of time but these are not generally measured in a systematic way or included in data sets. Usually mobility is not defined. It has become a rather vague concept associated with quality of life or progress and it is invoked as a “good thing” and something that should be increased. This is very clear in most national transport policies and at the European level where major transport policies and funding mechanisms are increasingly framed.
A recent EU research and development document (European Commission 2013a) begins with the main heading “Mobility for growth.” It does not define mobility. The document is an undiluted manifesto accepting and promoting the growth of mobility and advocating the importance of this growth for the success of wider economic policy objectives, asserting the unquestioned importance of endless economic growth and ignoring the voluminous literature on the impossibility of endless economic growth and of ecological and resource limits to growth (Douthwaite, 1992, Schneidewind, 2014).
SEARCH WORLD STREETS: World wide forum, library and research toolkit at your fingertips
Few things are more frustrating in this needful world than to see useful ideas and hard work ending up anonymously cloistered on some distant dusty shelf, real or virtual, and not be accessible to people and groups who could put them to good work, especially at a time of crisis as that we are living through right now. This was one of the challenges we faced at World Streets from the very beginning. How to keep all these good ideas and useful tools alive and available beyond the day on which they were first published and made known to the world.
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.
WHITELEGG ON MOBILITY. Chapter 1. Introduction
Walking to school
The following reproduces the full text of John Whitelegg’s opening chapter of his book, Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future, Straw Barnes Press. September 1, 2015. For further background on the 2018 online New Mobility Master Class program of which focuses on this introduction in the opening session, refer to: “Mobility, Death and Injury. (Let’s see what John Whitelegg has to say about this.)” at https://wp.me/psKUY-59l
Introduction
In the 1950s as a primary school child in Oldham (UK) I had very limited mobility measured in terms of the number of miles I ranged over each week. Life was intensely focused on the locality, intense contact with other children who lived within 500 metres of my home, and intense outdoor play for as many hours as my parents would allow (usually more than they would allow). We children decided when to go out, where to go, with whom and what to play and from an early age acquired a great deal of proficiency in negotiation skills, dispute resolution and independent decision-taking.
Life was very good, full and rich and the low level of mobility contributed to that richness. Time that might have been spent in a car being taken to organized “things” was put to good use in ways we decided. We did not need to roam very far from home and we enjoyed our local streets, second world war air-raid shelters (dark, dirty and mysterious) and large amounts of untidy urban space.
MANAGING THE SAFE CITY TRANSITION: . . . . . Notes for a Thinking Exercise . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . MOBILITY, DEATH AND INJURY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (Let’s see what John Whitelegg has to say about this.)
This posting is intended for informal peer review and comment here on World Streets in the context of a new international collaborative program of New Mobility Master Classes in the making for 2018. The text that follows is taken directly from Chapter 3 of John Whitelegg’s well-received 2015 book Mobility A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future. We thank Professor Whitelegg for making these valuable materials available to our readers. Let’s have a look.
Contents
Safe cities and the S L O W . . . movement
Article Source: http://www.slowmovement.com/slow_cities.php
Fired by the success and support for Slow Food the Italians set about initiating the Slow Cities movement. Slow cities are characterised by a way of life that supports people to live slow. Traditions and traditional ways of doing things are valued. These cities stand up against the fast-lane, homogenised world so often seen in other cities throughout the world. Slow cities have less traffic, less noise, fewer crowds.
Towns in Italy have banded together to form an organization and call themselves the Slow Cities movement. In their zeal to help the world they have formed what amounts to a global organization that sets out to control which cities in the world can call themselves Slow Cities and which cannot. This is not a movement. Social movements are movements from the bottom from the community. The seachange movement, the organic movement, the vegetarian movement, the homeschooling movement, are examples of movements. No-one controls them. No-one assesses you to see if you are allowed to call yourself a seachanger or if you can say you are a vegetarian.
ON LUUD SCHIMMELPENNINK – 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.
CARS, BICYCLES AND THE FATAL MYTH OF EQUAL RECIPROCITY
– Ashley Carruthers – https://theconversation.com/amp/cars-bicycles-and-the-fatal-myth-of-equal-reciprocity-81034
Any public conversation about on-road cycling in Australia seems to have only one metaphor for the relationship between drivers and cyclists: equal reciprocity.
An utterance like “Drivers must respect cyclists’ space on the road” must inevitably be followed by something like “For their part, cyclists must ride responsibly and obey the road rules.”
For instance, the campaign promoting a new road safety law in New South Wales tells us:
Drivers, bicycle riders and pedestrians all need to Go Together safely. We should all respect each other’s space and ensure that everyone stays safe.
WORLD STREETS __ A New Mobility Action Plan for 2022 