COP15 2009: CLIMATE IS THE PORTAL TO NEW MOBILITY (Letter to the organizers)

Message from World Streets to the Copenhagen Summit: The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference

(Stand back Ladies. Let the men take care of this. Oops? )

Letter from the Editor: ON THE RUN-UP TO COPENHAGEN AND COP15

EcoPlan International 
8 rue Joseph Bara
75006 Paris France

27 September 2009

Dear Colleagues,

The climate agenda is getting high political and media attention worldwide, and there are many important events scheduled for the months immediately ahead. That is good. But in our view the agenda for sustainable transport system reform at all levels is timid, incoherent and in large part irrelevant given the real priorities. Well, what is relevant then? How can we get the level of innovation and reform that is going to be critical in the years immediately ahead?

Transport, environment and public policy in hard times (Archives 2011 perspectives)

See https://www.facebook.com/NewMobilityAgenda/ 

– By Eric Britton, World Streets/New Mobility Agenda, February 2011
Scottish Transport Review, Issue 50. ISSN 1462-8708  http://stsg.org/str/str50.pdf

A Mental Architecture problem

“When it is dark you can see the stars”

Perhaps the main reason we are doing so poorly these days in transport is that we are making three fundamental errors in what we are looking at, the manner in which we are looking at it, and what we are doing with it:

Comment: Have we learned any of these lessons in the last eight years?  Or are we still turning over our motors in traffic? Your call!

COP15 2009: CLIMATE IS THE PORTAL TO NEW MOBILITY (Letter to the organizers)

Message from World Streets to the Copenhagen Summit: The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference

(Stand back Ladies. Let the men take care of this. Oops? )

Letter from the Editor: ON THE RUN-UP TO COPENHAGEN AND COP15

EcoPlan International 
8 rue Joseph Bara
75006 Paris France

27 September 2009

Dear Colleagues,

The climate agenda is getting high political and media attention worldwide, and there are many important events scheduled for the months immediately ahead. That is good. But in our view the agenda for sustainable transport system reform at all levels is timid, incoherent and in large part irrelevant given the real priorities. Well, what is relevant then? How can we get the level of innovation and reform that is going to be critical in the years immediately ahead?

ARCHIVES 2014: TRANSPORT SECTOR KEY TO CLOSING WORLD’S EMISSIONS GAP

This essay of  September 2014 by Benoit Lefevre and Angela Enriquez  of the World Resources Institute was written in the run-up to the 2014 UN Climate Summit in New York City is reproduced here in its entirety four years later as part of the extensive reading list which has been developed for our Climate/New Mobility master classes.

The three short sections that follow are notable in our present context by the questions they ask, namely:

        1. Why Should World Leaders Care About Transport?

        2. How Can World Leaders Achieve Climate Action in Transport? 

        3. Setting the Stage for Bold Action in the Transport Sector

With this program we shall try to provide our own best answers, commentaries, to those three key challenges.  Let’s go!

From the Archives: Transport Sector Key to Closing World’s Emissions Gap

by Benoit Lefevre and Angela Enriquez – September 19, 2014

Beijing China: Six lanes plus  Pedestrian overpass

Op-Ed 2010 Archives: Sharing/Strategy for a Small Planet. Part I

After many decades of a single dominant city-shaping transportation pattern – i.e., for those who could afford it: owning and driving our own cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles, getting into taxis by ourselves, riding in streets that are designed for cars and not much else — there is considerable evidence accumulating that we have already entered into a world of new mobility practices that are changing the transportation and city landscape in many ways. It has to do with sharing, as opposed to outright ownership. But strange to say, this trend seems to have escaped the attention of the policymakers in many of the institutions directly concerned.

Archives: Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities: 2002

A hero is someone who does what he can: the others do not.
– Romain Rolland, Nobel in Literature, 1915

From the editor : EcoPlan International, Paris, 28 September 2018.

Back in 2002 I was invited by the mayor of Stockholm and the team behind the Stockholm Partnership for Sustainable Cities to join them as Senior International Adviser and Jury Chairman, working together with team leaders, Adam Holmström and Gregor Hackman, to prepare, conduct and follow-up on this major collaborative  international event. We thought you might find some interest on how these challenges of sustainable cities were being looked at and dealt with (or not) sixteen long years ago. For the full program you can click here to   http://bit.ly/2xZgpvP . In this brief extract, we introduce the international jury: outstanding thinkers and leaders working in many different ways on the challenges of sustainable cities, most of whom are still, happily, continuing to work on these challenges today.

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.

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.

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.

Video Archives : Glasgow 2010 White Bikes Festival

 

On clicking to the video, you will see the Full Screen icon ¤  just before the vimeo button.

Archives. Vision Zero: The Accident Is Not the Problem

The Swedish Approach to Road Safety

Sweden’s top traffic safety strategist visits New York to share lessons from the original “Vision Zero.”

 * By Sarah Goodyear. Orignally appeared here – https://goo.gl/Wyp4iv – on 20 Nov. 2014

Matts-Åke Belin has a job title that might sound a little foreign to an American ear, but one that’s very important in his home country of Sweden: traffic safety strategist. He holds that position with the Swedish Transport Administration, where he has been one of the key architects of the policy known as Vision Zero. Since approved by the Swedish parliament in October 1997, Vision Zero has permeated the nation’s approach to transportation, dictating that the government manage the nation’s streets and roads with the ultimate goal of preventing fatalities and serious injuries. It’s a radical vision that has made Sweden an international leader in the area of road safety.

From the archives: Lee Schipper on the Perils of Asia’s Hyper-Motorization

This article by the late Lee Schipper appeared in the pages of World Streets several weeks before his death, at far too young an age.  And here four years later, as we continue to struggle to find ways to make our sector less catastrophically destructive and more people- and  climate-friendly, you will find that his tough words and uncompromising arguments are every bit as relevent today as they were back in 2011.  Why, one might ask, are we so very slow to learn?aThe editor. World Streets, Paris. 3 August 2011.

Our old friend and long time colleague Lee Schipper is sitting in a hospital bed in Berkeley California today, and since your editor is stuck in Paris and can’t visit him, we thought that while he gets his strength back we would  reach into our and others archives and publish a series of pieces to celebrate his deep knowledge of all that World Streets is about, his  excellent judgement and his world level communications skills. (And if you have something by Lee that you would like to share with our readers as we wait for him to swing back into action, please send it on.)

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.

Preparing your next Car Free Day: Check out the fundamentals. The First Car Free Days Challenge: Toledo Spain, October 1994

Whereas Car Free Days have been organized in cities around the world all over the year for the last two  decades, there is inevitably a spate of high activity in the month of September, much of it the result of the European Commission’s continuing commitment to both the concept of Car Free Days and their own European Mobility Week. And each year we here at World Streets dig into our archives and dust off one or two of the classics as a timely reminder of the fact that the Car Free Day concept has been around and doing its bit since the first international announcement and challenge was made in Toledo Spain on 19 October 1994.

Why do we bother to do this year after year? After all, there is copious documentation and background available at a click, as a quick tour of Google of those three little words yields somewhat more than 55,000 entries, including a fair if distinctly uneven introduction in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car-Free_Days. The problem is that most of this material seriously misses the point, and as a result often handicaps cities and groups wishing to organize a Day (a week or month close) to underestimate potential of this approach. The trick is that all of this is quite a simple as it may at first glance appear.

To this end, here we are once again minding the store with the original 1994 article announcing the concept, along with several others from our archives which would appear here in the coming days. A general reference which the reader may find of use is the general introduction which appears here – https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/car-free-days/. You will find at the end of this reposting, three separate annexes which provide supplemental background on (Annex A) New Mobility – 1988-1994 Program Summary; (B) Other Tools to Get the Job Done; and (C) a listing of more recent references.

World Streets Photo Album: 2009-2015

STREET SCENES AROUND THE WORLD

A selection taken from more than three thousand photographs, cartoons, maps, charts and graffiti  from almost as many sources that have appeared in the pages of World Streets since we first went to press in 2009.  Many tell stories in themselves which our readers are warmly invited to complete from their own experience and imagination

Depending on the speed of your internet connection you may have to wait some seconds before the first images appear. From then on all you have to do is click the photo to move on to the next one.

Sempé: A Short History of Social Mobility

A Short History of Social Mobility in five small frames – from a collection of drawings and pastels that first appeared in the edition “Nothing is easy” (Rien n’est simple) by Jean-Jacques Sempé, published a half century ago in 1962.  And even back then the message was howlingly clear. Amazing to think of how little it is understood two generations later in most cities around the world, rich and poor, even though the indisputable proof is right before our eyes. If only we choose to look. (From World Streets Archives)

“Worst Practices”: Regulations that prohibit shared taxis anywhere on the planet

“Regulations that prohibit shared taxis are an example of worst practice.” – Ann Hackett

In eleven short words Ann Hackett has put her finger on one of the most egregious “Worst Practices” in our field. And, as it happens, one that we know enough about to easily resolve.

 

Bus stop in the rain. USA.

Bus stop in the rain. USA . Source unknown.

Graffiti on Bishop Street in Penang