Op-Ed: Coronavirus has exposed the fragility of auto-centric cities

  ShutterstockMikeDotta            [With kind thanks to the author, Ben Holland  of the Rocky Mountain Institute – @BenHollandATX and the publisher, Green Biz for this excellent overview.:  See https://bit.ly/3bzrpTe for full text.  

The coronavirus has exposed the ills of continued automobile-centric urban planning practices that adversely impact equity, health and the climate. Those of us who are working from home, own an automobile and can conveniently make grocery runs may overlook the fact that many in this country are not so lucky. Many households rely on public transit systems that are struggling to provide service, or they may bear high transportation costs exacerbated by a lack of access to the most critical of needs.

No technological solution will solve the systemic problems with our urban land use and transportation policies. We simply need to commit to the development of complete neighborhoods and communities that ensure access to food, healthcare, education and jobs — without relying on personal vehicles.

In the midst of this crisis, many are pointing to the outbreak of COVID-19 in urban centers such as New York City to support anti-density arguments. This sentiment is nothing new in the environmental community, much of which grew out of anti-development advocacy of the 1970s and ’80s. But the world is a different place, and it’s time for the environmental community to push back on these arguments.

After all, compact and mixed-use neighborhoods — which can include medium or “gentle” density levels — are, by nature, resilient and energy efficient. Barring supply chain collapse, they far outperform suburban communities in their access to food and other critical needs during crises such as the one we are experiencing.

We simply need to commit to the development of neighborhoods and communities that ensure access to food, healthcare, education and jobs — without relying on personal vehicles.

Why then, do we continue to outlaw this resiliency in most of our cities?

 

WOMEN MOVE DIFFERENTLY (and what everyone working in mobility should understand)

Understanding women’s experiences of using a male- oriented mobility system can help improve it for everyone.  Here’s a guide:

1. Mobility is not gender neutral, and may have a male bias.
2. Women have different needs and behaviours when it comes to transportation.
3. Understanding their perspective could improve mobility for everyone.

As multiple studies have shown, women have different patterns, needs and behaviours. Female mobility is characterized by trip-chaining and time poverty. The main reasons for this are that women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work, the gender pay gap, and women’s physical condition. Women have a smaller range when traveling the same amount of time. Women carry luggage and accompany people, more often on public transport and by foot. The car is less often the default solution.

World Streets 2020: New Mobility Mission Statement

Say Good-bye to Old Mobility

Plan Zero – also known as “old mobility” or “no plan in sight” – with its stress on more supply, more vehicles and more infrastructure as the knee-jerk answer to all our mobility problems — has been the favored path for conceptualizing, decision-making and investment in the sector over the last 70 years. It is well-known and easy to see where it is leading.  Aggressing the planet, costing us a bundle, draining the world’s petroleum reserves, and delivering poor service for the majority . . . Plan Zero is a clear failure. It’s time for directive, coherent, effective action without waiting around for reprieve or good news from some evasive short term fix of distant technology promise.  It is time to move to a New Mobility Agenda and fifteen pragmatic, affordable, near-term steps to sustainable transport,  sustainable cities and sustainable lives.

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.)

View complete profile

 

Op-Ed Archives: Danijel Rebolj on The Cultures of Mobility

The Cultures of Mobility

What message could a private citizen, an engineer no less, from a small city of a country with barely two million inhabitants send to the Secretary of Transportation of the United States of America? Happily, there is more to transport and social policy than mere size. So if you decide to continue reading, I may have a modest message for you after all.

This evening, 6 February 2009, an interesting event will take place in my city. A thematic event has been organized, dedicated to the “Culture of Mobility”. In this we want to show (again) at the culture of mobility and the culture of the city are one and the same.

Maribor, my beautiful city, the second-largest in Slovenia, is to become the cultural capital of Europe in 2012. Today’s event will start with a documentary film to open up the perspectives of transportation decision-makers in the city of New York, “Contested Streets: a Mobility Tour of Four Great World Cities”. “Contested” takes its point of departure the old habit of automatically building new infrastructure for cars every time a traffic problem arose. The world-famous and world-practiced “forecast and build” culture

TRANSITION TOOLS AND 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 rich Climate/Mobility nexus 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

Article continues at: : https://wordpress.com/post/worldstreets.wordpress.com/19170

Also have a look at

* https://www.facebook.com/MobilityBehavior

* https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/tdm-primer/

* https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/2020actiontoolkit/  

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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.)

View complete profile

 

TDM – A World Streets Primer

Since TDM (Transportation Demand Management) is a key pillar of the New Mobility Agenda strategy, and of our now forming-up Five Percent Challenge Climate Emergency program, it is important that the basic distinctions are clear for all.  In one of our recent master classes, when several students asked me to clarify for them, I turned the tables instead and asked them, since we are now firmly in the 21st century, to go home, spend a bit of time online and come up with something that answered their question to their satisfaction.  Here is what they came up with, taken whole hog from http://bit.ly/2rTxHrr (which we then lightly edited together and offer for your reading pleasure).

Quick-start references:

The Rough Road to Climate Protection and Sustainable Mobility: Values, priorities, behavior and, finally, understanding people (and ourselves)

What many people call “transportation” . .  is at its very essence not about road or bridges, nor vehicles or technology, and not even about money.  Above all it is about people, their needs, fears, desires and the decisions they make. And the backdrop — real and mental — against which they make those decision. The transport planner needs to know more them and take this knowledge into the center of the planning and policy process. What makes them tick, individually and collectively.  What do they want and what they are likely to resist. And people, as we all know, are intensely complicated, personal and generally change-resistant. .But if we take the time and care we can start to understand them, at least a bit better. Which is a start.

Oslo takes bold steps to reduce air pollution, improve livability

Source: https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/oslo-takes-bold-steps-reduce-air-pollution-improve-livability 

Norway’s capital city Oslo, home to over 670,000 people, is boldly pushing forward with a range of measures to improve air quality for the city’s inhabitants. Oslo is one of 42 cities who take part in Breathe Life, a campaign led by the World Health Organization, UN Environment and the Climate & Clean Air Coalition that inspires cities and individuals to protect our health and planet from the effects of air pollution.

Zero-emission vehicles play a key part in the city’s strategy to reduce C0² equivalents by 95 per cent in 2030, and city officials are encouraging people to make the transition to electric vehicles. Benefits for drivers include reduces taxes, access to bus and taxi lanes, free travel on toll roads and public ferries, and free municipal parking. Over 1,000 charging stations have been added in recent years.

Meanwhile, all public transport in Oslo and neighbouring Akershus county is to be powered exclusively by renewable energy by 2020.

A “BETTER THAN CAR” MOBILITY SYSTEM

Nobody in a democratic 21st century country is going to willingly  step down on the scale of comfort and economy. Fair enough, so let’s see how we can all step UP in terms of  life quality for all  with an cost-competitive, equity-based low-emissions  transport strategy.

The objective here is to combine vision, policy, technology and entrepreneurial skills in such a way to create and make available to all a combined, affordable, multi-level, convenient, high choice  mobility system which for just about everybody should be more efficient than owning and driving a car in or into town.  Let us start with this as our goal and then see what is the work that must be done in order to turn it into a reality.

THE FIVE PERCENT CHALLENGE, COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING (In brief)

 * * Working draft for peer review and comment of 17 July 2019

</b>The basic concept is simple in principle, namely: to identify and put to work a strategic package of proven, street-tested, cost-effective measures, tools and means  to reduce GHG emissions from the mobility sector in a cooperating city or place by a targeted five percent (or better) in a year or less. Realization of the concept on the other hand is highly demanding and requires considerable technical competence, abundant political savvy and leadership by daily example.

The underlying goal is highly ambitious, and perhaps not immediately evident.  It is about people and choices, and not so much about infrastructure or vehicles.  We are talking here about influencing behaviour of individuals and groups in this specific part of their day to day lives. Since indeed the only way that we can successfully make this critical transition in a functioning democracy — is no less than to change behaviour by creating a transformed urban (or rural, or other demographic) ecosystem of  connected realities, time, space, perceptions, awarenesses, values, fears, prejudices, habits and, hopefully in parallel with this an wide array of “better than car” or  at least satisficing mobility choices.  The key to all this being to offer what are perceived as better choices for all when it comes to daily life, climate, mobility, environment  and democracy impacts.  The challenge we now face is to accompany this transition, and this in the teeth of a rapidly degrading environment and still a largely skeptical world.

THE 2020 FIVE PERCENT EMERGENCY CHALLENGE: (Cross-cutting issues, measures, sources & startup strategies)

Executive Summary:

QUESTION: Is it going to be possible to cut greenhouse gas emissions resulting from day to day transport in your city by five percent next year?

RESPONSE: Yes *

___________________________________

* But you have to be very smart

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?  (Attributed to A. Einstein)

Op-Ed: To Fight Climate Change, Think Politics First, and Often

By Nathan Lobel, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment|Feb. 26, 2019

In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that we have little more than a decade to stave off climate catastrophe. Avoiding such a fate, the panel warned, “would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems… unprecedented in terms of scale.”

Punctuating a year of natural and political climate-related disasters, the IPCC report sparked renewed calls for action. Economists, environmentalists, and policy elites took to the nation’s opinion pages with a common prescription: to fight climate change, Congress should put a price on carbon, thus “internalizing” the social cost of fossil fuel consumption.

From one perspective, converging on carbon pricing makes lots of sense — after all, carbon prices are often thought to be the most efficient means to mitigate climate change. But, despite its theoretical utility, carbon pricing has also struggled to deliver the real and drastic emissions reductions that we so desperately need.

FIVE PERCENT CLIMATE/NEW MOBILITY EMERGENCY CHALLENGE: Cross-cutting issues, sources and strategies

 * * THIS IS A ROUGH FIRST DRAFT. REQUIRES TOTAL REWRITE   * *

2019 Climate/New Mobility Emergency Action Plan & Demonstration

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? (Attributed to Albert Einstein)

The sources,  references and links that follow here – we think of them as building blocks – are presented here in first working draft form and are intended to serve to inform and guide  students, researchers, concerned citizens and others who are interested in getting up to speed on the wide range of challenging topics that need to be brought in to the analysis and eventual work plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the local transport sector by a radical target and in a single year . These references include a considerable variety of issues, hints and developments (examples, free public transport, economic levers, value capture, full gender parity, etc., etc.) which have important roles to play in this wholesale reconstruction of the new mobility ecosystem.

Online List of 219 Available World Climate Change Initiatives *

Climate Action Plan (CAP)

A Climate Action Plan (CAP) is a framework of strategies intended to guide efforts for climate change mitigation. More specifically, a climate action plan is a detailed and strategic framework (ecosystem) for measuring, planning, and reducing Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and related climatic impacts. It can be scoped and carried at any of a wide range of geographic or government levels: national, regional, cities or even neighborhoods or eco-districts.  No less, such an action plan can be carried out by and at the levels of large or smaller companies, employers, cultural centers and events, schools and universities, and even families or individuals.

As an example: Municipalities design and utilize climate action plans as customized road maps for making informed decisions and understanding where and how to achieve the largest and most cost-effective emissions reductions that are in alignment with other municipal goals. Climate action plans, at a minimum, include an inventory of existing emissions, explicit reduction goals, targets, and timetables, and analyzed and prioritized reduction actions. Ideally, a climate action plan also includes an implementation strategy that identifies required resources and funding mechanisms.

Help from Wikipedia

* Useful tools and references from Wikipedia, http://bit.ly/2Bre9A1

Women, Climate Change and . . . Leadership

[From Wikipedia on Women, Leadership and Climate Change (2019 State of the art at http://bit.ly/2HMbKVZ)]

Introduction: The contributions of women in climate change have received increasing attention in the early 21st century. Feedback from women and the issues faced by women have been described as “imperative” by the United Nations and “critical” by the Population Reference Bureau. A report by the World Health Organizationconcluded that incorporating gender-based analysis would “provide more effective climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Women have made major contributions to climate change research and policy and to broader analysis of global environmental issues. They include many women scientists as well as policy makers and activists.

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.

INNOVATION: FROM OPEN DATA TO A NEW ECOSYSTEM FOR MOBILITY AND CLIMATE.

Transport/mobility is an ecosystem. There is the one we have.  And perhaps the one we want.

Op-Ed: What/who keeps holding back New Mobility reform in your city in 2019?

From the editor’s desk: If you get it, New Mobility policy reform is a no-brainer in January 2019. However, while the New Mobility Agenda is a great starting place, it is not going to get the job somehow miraculously done just because it is the only game in town when it comes to sustainable transport. There is plenty of competition for your thin wallet,  all that space on the street, and  especially for that space between our ears. We have a few potential sticking points here that need to be overcome first.

Let’s have a quick look. After some years of talking with cities, and working and observing in many different circumstances, here is my personal shortlist of the barriers most frequently encountered in trying to get innovative transportation reform programs off the ground, including even in cities that really do badly need a major mobility overhaul.

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