Op-Ed Uganda: Climate Change Mitigation – What must our government do?

Minibuses, or taxis, stuck in a traffic jam in Kampala. 20 Jan 2019

By Vincent Ogal.  Source: http://www.unesco-uganda.ug/ug/dreports/30/

Climate change is one of the absolute challenges facing humanity in this modern age, as the Earth’s near-surface temperatures continue to rise. Climate change is likely to disrupt the Earth’s ecological systems and to have serious negative consequences for agricultural production, forests, water supply, health systems and overall human development. Vulnerable populations (mainly the poor and most marginalized, including children, women and people with disabilities in developing countries) are particularly poorly equipped to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change.

As temperatures throughout East Africa and the rest of the world rise, precipitation is expected to increase, along with the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, heat waves and landslides. Scientists predict that the rate of climate change will be more rapid than previously expected.

Africa Streets and MOBILIZE, Dar es Salaam, 26-28 June 2018

See https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/africa-streets-2018-letter-of-invitation/

Subject: Help wanted to bring Africa Streets to Dar es Salaam for the 26-28 June 2018 ITDP MOBILIZE events

Dear Friends of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, greetings,

Here is what I want to do for our common cause and that just may interest you.. It is a long shot, but after half a day of turning the ideas around in my mind I decided to give it a try and seek counsel on this from our 10k plus international readers..   Let’s have a look.

AFRICA STREETS 2018: LETTER OF INVITATION TO AN OPEN COLLABORATIVE PROJECT

Another day in morning traffic in Lagos

AFRICA STREETS:

Stories of New Mobility Projects in Africa: Successes, Failures and Work in Progress

World Streets. Paris. 21 April 2018

Dear African friends and colleagues,

I’m in the process of trying to gather my thoughts on a book bringing together a collection of lively real world stories of attempted new mobility — what I like to think of as “pattern break” – projects that have been carried out in cities and rural areas in a dozen or so African countries. I want to emphasize here the choice of the word “stories” as opposed to when we hear more often in the literature, titles such as “case studies” or “best practices”. I think it is important to try to reach in and understand (Anyway, I do not believe in the concept of “best practices”, and tend to prefer the less blatant wording of better practices.)

Africa Streets Researchers Toolkit (Ver. 1.0)

Welcome to the Africa Streets 2018 Toolbox (Ver. 1.0): a cross-section of handy one click references and tools which are intended to be useful for anyone who wishes to dig into the facts, the problems and the realities of the events and choices which concern us here.

At this point we shall not attempt to introduce them to provide eventually helpful user hints and background as necessary to facilitate their full and easy use. But for now, you have them here waiting for your use and eventual views, questions and suggestions – which can help us all in improving and better explaining what follows here by way of first introduction.  Thanks for sharing your thought and suggestions to eric.britton@ecoplan.org.

AFRICA STREETS 2018: LETTER OF INVITATION.

Another day in morning traffic in Lagos

AFRICA STREETS:

Stories of New Mobility Projects in Africa: Successes, Failures and Work in Progress

* * *  In this first week we have thus far heard from colleagues in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and Zambia, though at this point these are just exploratory conversations. We hope to have at least ten telling and varied stories, hopefully more. * * *

Dear African friends and colleagues,

AFRICA STREETS: First sources

Initial sources of information on this collaborative project

• 7 April  2017. Letter of Invitation: http://wp.me/psKUY-4SC
• World Streets on Africa : https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/africa/
• World Transport Policy & Practice – on Africa – https://goo.gl/BBFe8a
• Facebook team page at https://www.facebook.com/AfricaStreets
• Gatnet: Gender and Transport in the developing world – https://dgroups.org/worldbank/gatnet/
• Twitter – https://twitter.com/worldstreets

And this is only the beginning.

STORIES OF NEW MOBILITY INITIATIVES IN AFRICA : Successes, Failures and Work in Progress

Dear African friends and colleagues,

I’m in the process of trying to gather my thoughts on a book bringing together a collection of lively real world stories of attempted new mobility — what I like to think of as “pattern break”) – projects that have been carried out in cities and areas in a dozen or so African countries. I want to emphasize here the choice of the word “stories” as opposed to when we hear more often in the literature, titles such as “case studies” or “best practices”. I think it is important to try to reach in and understand (Anyway, I do not believe in the concept of “best practices”, and tend to prefer the less blatant wording of better practices.)

Africa Streets: Toward a New Mobility Agenda

One more morning in traffic in Lagos.

Mainstreaming gender issues into the rural transport sector: Seven research programmes underway in Asia and Africa

Gatnet: Collaborative problem-solving for a world-wide action agenda

Following a  discussion on GATNET  that took place during November-December 2015 — reference http://wp.me/p1bevG-7d — around why gender has not been mainstreamed into the rural transport sector and why addressing gender issues in rural transport has not been transformative, changing the unequal relations between women and  men, UK AID has commissioned seven research programmes in Asia and Africa to explore these issues  further. The  countries in which the research is taking place are Nepal (in South Asia), Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone,Liberia, Uganda and Ghana (in Africa). (See http://www.research4cap.org/SitePages/Home.aspx or join GATNET (below) for further updates).

Action Agenda on Safe Walking for Africa’s Children

The trip to school. One more  morning trip on the roads of Africa

Dear Eric,

We are proud to announce the release of a new report, Step Change: An Action Agenda on Safe Walking for Africa’s Children, that Amend has produced in collaboration with the FIA Foundation and the Global Initiative for Child Health and Mobility.

The Mobility Complex: John Whitelegg lights a fire.

Important announcement: Mobility has been priced to  move. Available in both paper and eBook form for less than USD 10.00. See http://tinyurl.com/zxclcz4
(Thank you John for thinking about students, fund-strapped NGOs and readers in developing, smaller cities with tight budgets.)

John Whitelegg, Professor John Whitelegg, is a remarkable man. He has spent his entire professional life as a scholar, teacher, critic, publisher, activist and politician, trying to make sense out of our curious world and the contradictions of transport and mobility. And in a successful attempt to bring all the threads together, what he has learned about our topic in three decades of international work spanning all continents, he has just produced for our reading and instruction a remarkable and, I truly believe, much-needed book.  His title gives away the game – Mobility: Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future.

 

News from Transaid: Inspiring women to take charge of their own health and increasingly their own transport

Update from Caroline Barber, Head of Programmes, Transaid

The organisation I work for (Transaid) were involved in an initiative to train female drivers and transport officers from a cooperative in Accra so that they could manage the transport of agricultural products to market themselves. This was back in 2007/2008. The programme had some success but there were a number of challenges, for example perceived issues of security for women drivers on long distance vehicles, the carrying capacity of the vehicles (which were sourced as a donation) were also probably too small to really drive down the transport costs enough. In time some of the coops decided to turn the vehicles into tro tros (mini bus taxis and hire men to drive them).

Gender, Equity and Transport in . . . Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada. . .

Gender, Equity and Transport Forum 2.0

Who  do  you  know  who  is giving these critical challenges of gender, equity and transport their consistent attention, place after place, year after year and measure after measure in  . . . Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Republic of the  Congo, Rwanda, Senegal, Solomon,  Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tunisia, Uganda, United Kingdom, United,States, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe. And who talk to each other about it?

Have you heard about Gatnet?  A community of practice and public policy program on Gender and Transport, addressing the problems of women, particularly Southern women and girls, facing the everyday reality of gender inequality in the transport sector. The program deals with specific problems in specific places in Africa, Asia and Latin America, both cities and in very poor outlying rural areas where safe and fair access is an enormous problem of day to day life, often falling especially hard on women and young girls.

Let’s have a look.

Op-Ed: Sandton Ecomobility Month – More Ambition Needed

Stephen Grootes reporting from Johannesburg EcoMobility 2015

OP-ED: SANDTON ECOMOBILITY MONTH – MORE AMBITION NEEDED

Johannesburg. Daily Maverick. 2 Nov. 2015.  Source: http://goo.gl/Bw3SQv

Following and learning from Johannesburg’s EcoMobility Month

The city of Johannesburg has over the month of October engaged in an interesting experiment to limit car circulation and encourage softer means of getting to and around in a portion of their central business district, Sandton.  The project was planned and carried out in cooperation with ICLEI’s EcoMobiity program, and is the second in a series which began in 2013 in Suwon Korea, and which in 2017 will move on to the City of Kaohsiung, the second city of Taiwan.

World Streets has made an effort to follow the Johannesburg project and in cooperation with local transport, city planning and environment groups, in an effort to piece together a balanced picture of how all this is working out. If you click to the following hot links, you will be taken in a first instance to the twenty or so postings that appeared in our World Streets Online Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/WorldStreetsOnline. And following that to a Google summary of the latest media coverage.

* For World Streets coverage of EcoMobility 2015 -> https://goo.gl/UHoRgu

* For latest media coverage of Johannesburg event -> https://goo.gl/epJe79

From the Archives: To achieve Sustainable Transport, Militate for Full Gender Parity in all Planning, Decision, Investment and Implementation Bodies.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day:
Today, 8 March 2011 is International Women’s Day, the one hundredth anniversary of
this great and necessary idea. So what better 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.

Encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home

Photo: Massimo Pinca/AP

Pope Francis’s just-promulgated encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home”, is without a doubt the most important single document to be published, initiative  to be taken, since the phrase sustainable development was invented three long and patently unsuccessful decades ago. This extraordinary document of less than one hundred pages aims to inform and to rally the forces of responsible  behavior and responsible governance to the cause and the plight of our planet and to the role of active democracy.  Beautifully written (the English language version at least), clearly presented and cogently argued in clear day to day language.    It is an excellent and inspiring read. However it is not a recipe, it has its shortcomings — it is a challenge, and thus requires that we read it carefully and do our own sorting out of the issues and the counsel it offers. Hardly an effortless process.

One of the more disheartening passages includes his listing of all the promising international agreements that have failed for lack of support from the leaders who signed them.

Let’s get disabled kids to school

This illustration shows how it should be: Disabled kids in developing countries should be able to get to school using a variety of accessible transport in order to learn alongside other kids. We hope you will help us as we work with others to turn this vision into a reality.

Ten Points of Light

[This posting announces a new component of World Streets Battles of Ideas, that was launched yesterday.]

If you wanted to know about the state of play of the sustainable transport revolution in a given country, where do you turn first? Let’s see if we can be of some help with a few suggestions at least to get you going.

Points of Light? World Streets shortlist of outstanding individuals, groups and organizations  who are, each in their own way, contributing to showing the way in your country, when it comes to the very difficult up-hill transition from Old Mobility (back when we were fascinated by infrastructure, vehicles and, implicitly,  privilege) to New Mobility (a world that favors instead people, access, equity, systemic efficiency  and quality of life). Might be an NGO, university or other research program, outstanding city agency, consultant, company, operator, labor union, cooperative, foundation, institution, government  agency, technology source,  investigative media, active citizens, event, etc.  Or a project, exemplary or a failure rich in lessons.   Or eventually live linkages to outstanding and useful international and regional cooperative programs.

Eleven Steps Toward a Brighter Future

Way to Go! 11 Reasons Why Trains, Buses, Bikes and Walking Move Us Toward a Brighter Future

– Guest editorial, by Jay Walljasper

According to the pundits and prophets who dominate the media, the future of transportation is all figured out for us.  Cheaper gas prices mean we can still count on our private cars to take us everywhere we want to go in the years to come. The only big change down the road will be driverless autos, which will make long hours behind the wheel less boring and more productive.

But this everything-stays-the-same vision ignores some significant social developments. Americans have actually been driving less per-capita for the past decade, bucking a century-long trend of ever-increasing dependence on automobiles.