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)

*** WORLD STREETS INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL *** (to be updated, with full approval) _ _ _

With one eye to laying the base for our work and collaborative programs , we are currently in the process of updating and extending this list of distinguished international colleagues, each of whom is hard at work day after day on challenges, projects and programs, alone and with others, all in support of the principles of sustainable development and equity, in cities and countries around the world.  It is our intention to have the revised and expanded version of this panel listing online by end May 2019, as part of our celebration of the first ten years of our collaborative work in support of World Streets.

Since our work program is being totally shifted to the the challenge of achieving sharp near-term decreases in gases causing global warming —  CO2, CH4, N2O, PFCs, etc., — and in particular those emanating from the local mobility sector, we hope to encourage shorter or longer contributions from the members of our advisory panel on this critical topic

The revised version of this posting (end April 2020) will include some explanatory materials  to clarify the process by which this “New Mobility Majority” is in the process of overtaking the old attitudes, approaches and policies which have been largely responsible for our gross under-performance in the sector,  all the more important as the 21st century noose tightens in terms of climate, local environment, energy supply, scarce resources, the economy, congestion, poor service quality for the majority, and the long list goes on.  (In the meantime we want to hear from you with your ideas and outstanding nominations for the panel.  And if you spot errors or omissions on the following or anywhere in our work, yes please do get in touch and let us know.)

SAFE CITY STRATEGIES : MANAGING THE TRANSITION. (Working notes for a wide-open 2022 Collaborative Thinking Exercise)

Safe City Strategies for bringing sustainable transport to your city .

The Seven Pillars

From Australia Archives: 41 Measures to Manage Traffic Congestion in your City

Good morning Brisbane

Comment on: COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENTS: REVIEW OF URBAN CONGESTION – TRENDS, IMPACTS AND SOLUTIONS

Good intentions that somehow don’t eventuate?

Thanks Eric.

Interesting to a person involved in questioning whether (m)any of these items (strategies, policies, etc) are really being applied widely or only in a few specific cases in Australia as compared with implementation elsewhere

..

There does seem to be a lot of “weasel” words i.e., which are open to interpretation?

World Streets Open 2021 Team Problem-Solving Initiative: Climate/Emergency Mobility/Space Jobs/Work Streets/Cars Private/Shared Vision/Strategy Equity/Women Action/Manage

– – – – – –  > Working draft of 1 May 2020

WORLD STREETS is betting its future on the coming immediate-term transition led by certain ambitious, responsible cities, nations, organizations and citizens in different parts of the world to come together to break the downward pattern of ever-increasing climate stress — and before the challenge to plan and execute highly aggressive near-term initiatives aimed at sharply cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the mobility sector. And doing all this while working with proven tools, policies and strategies that harness cost-effective, readily available, measures, technologies, operational and management competence. Our job is to support them as best we can.

CONTEXT/KEYWORDS:: Climate/Emergency  Cities/Mobility  Vision/Strategy  Streets/Cars  Time/Space  Private/Shared  Equity/Women  Action/Manage

• • You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.  – Buckminster Fuller

THE 2020 FIVE PERCENT CLIMATE/MOBILITY CHALLENGE

A CRISIS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO MISS

Paris. 22 March 2020

So now what? Well, for sure life is about to get very interesting. With the unmet challenge of the world climate emergency, and now out of the blue the Coronavirus fast upon us, we are now in the process of putting the old century once and for all firmly behind us. Not so much because we want to, but because we HAVE to. It’s a new world out there and we must meet it!

2020 will be the year of transition. And at the end of this round we will never be the same. One way or another! Your call!

So for our bit, please stay tuned to World Streets and Co. Here and at . . .

OpEd. Let’s harness the pandemic to expand our climate/mobility options

The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to embrace the future of work-from-home and the greater adoption of walking and cycling.

By Lloyd Wright, Senior Urban Development Transport Specialists, Asian   Development Bank – https://blogs.adb.org/author/lloyd-wright https://blogs.adb.org/let-s-use-the-pandemic-to-expand-our-transport-options

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives and livelihoods, and has become a devastating global human tragedy.  A change event of this magnitude also affects fundamentally how we work and interact.  Personal mobility in the age of COVID-19 may never be quite the same again.  The new normal of mobility, though, may represent a unique opportunity. 

Work-from-home has always represented an option to both reduce emissions and promote family time.  However, work-from-home’s potential has never been fully realized in terms of actual practice, as long-standing practices and cultures in Asia and the Pacific often prioritize physical time in the office.

New information technologies have meant that work-from-home does not have to substantially reduce the quality of workplace interactions.  A plethora of software apps, such as Google Hangout, Skype, Cisco Webex, MS Teams, and Zoom, are now available to give a visual space for sharing information and facilitating decision-making.  We are moving away from mere tele-conferencing to lifelike virtual interaction. While work-from-home may never fully replace workplace presence, the new technologies at least offer the potential to reduce the need for everyday commuting.

Lockdowns across many cities and countries has meant that a unique global experiment is underway.  The World Health Organization estimates that 7 million persons suffer premature deaths each year from air pollution, and that 1.3 million persons perish in car crashes.  For cities with air quality problems, such as Beijing, Delhi, and Manila, the lockdowns have visibly brought pristine skies, as also evidenced by satellite imagery. In addition, the University of California at Davis has been tracking reductions in car crashes in California during the state’s partial lockdown conditions.  Serious injuries and fatalities in the past week have been halved from 400 to just 200 per day.

None of this is to minimize the appalling human tragedy of COVID-19’s trail of death and illness. The  social and economic cost of the pandemic is staggering. But these types of comparisons do indicate what could be achieved if we adopted sustainable energy and transport practices once the pandemic has passed.

Of course, the virus also hits certain forms of sustainable personal mobility quite hard.  Buses and trains place passengers in close proximity, heightening disease transmission risk.  During this time of crisis, to the extent persons have options, passengers do appear to be avoiding public transport, and many cities have closed public transport in its entirety. Most likely, governments will need to step forward with financial support to public transport operators for both short-term and long-term viability.

  The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on work-from-home initiatives.

Conversely, this situation does represent a large potential opportunity for walking and cycling.  Already, in the early days of the virus, New York City is recording record levels of cyclists.  The city’s Department of Transport reports a 50 percent increase in cycling over the same period last year, and a 67 percent increase in usage of New York’s CitiBike bicycle sharing system.

Home delivery services also appear to be experiencing a significant increase in the wake of virus lockdowns.  Such services hold the potential to reduce overall transport congestion and emissions by effectively achieving economies of scales in urban delivery logistics.

With streets now operating under dramatically reduced traffic levels, an opportunity exists to quickly address long-standing needs that are difficult to implement under day-to-day realities.  Upgrading footpaths and developing cycleways is the type of quick win that can utilize the economic stimulus spending being deployed to shore up falling economies. These investments can be done quickly and create jobs at a time when it is most needed.

The pandemic is a change event like few others.  The dramatic break in personal mobility from past habits represents an opportunity to view cities in a new way.  From this moment, we could embrace the future of work-from-home and the greater adoption of walking and cycling.  Perhaps there is yet a small silver lining from this unfolding tragedy.

#    #    #

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.

SAFE CITY STRATEGIES : MANAGING THE TRANSITION. (Working notes for a 2021 Thinking Exercise)

A COMPENDIUM OF ONE HUNDRED BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER MEASURES YOUR CITY COULD START TO IMPLEMENT TOMORROW MORNING TO SAVE THE PLANET . . . cut GHG emissions, get people to work on time, reduce traffic accidents, save lives, clear the air, improve health, strengthen the economy, create a sense of community and improve accessibility, mobility and quality of life for all.

We often hear that sustainable transportation reform  is going to require massive public investments, large construction projects, elaborate technology deployments, and above all and by their very nature are going to take a long time before yielding significant results. This is quite simply not true. This approach, common in the last century and often associated with the “American transportation model”, no longer has its place in a competitive, efficient, democratic city  And we can start tomorrow, if we chose to.

To get a feel for this transformative learning reality let’s start with a quick look at a first lot of ideas for Slow Street Architecture as a major means for reducing traffic related nuisances, accident prevention and improving quality of life for all.  These approaches are not just “nice ideas”.  They have proven their merit and effectiveness in hundreds of cities around the world. There is no good reason that they cannot do the same in your city. Starting tomorrow morning.

(For further background on external sources feeding this listing, see Sources and Clues section below.)

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/  

# # #

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

 

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.

2020 CLIMATE/MOBILITY ACTION PLAN & PARTNER SEARCH Invitation to pitch in and join the Five Percent Challenge in your city

THE  FIVE PERCENT 2020 CLIMATE CHALLENGE

          The World Climate Emergency   // //  The New Mobility Action Plan 

You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.   —  Buckminster Fuller

 Communication to individuals and groups contacting us to express interest in knowing more about the Five Percent Challenge program, cities and projects in 2020

Thank you for your expression of interest in our shared concerns about our cities and our planet.  We are honored and look forward to being able to follow progress in your related work and projects as well.

Looking ahead — and just so it is clear — as a result of a vigorous recentering of my priority concerns for 2020 and beyond, I have shifted the totality of my work and engagement to the World Climate Emergency — and the following six key words and references: Climate.Cities.Space.Time.Action.NewMobility.org.

2020 PARTNER SEARCH: 

The 2020 project is aiming to network and bring together . . .

THE FIVE PERCENT CHALLENGE: WORLD CLIMATE/MOBILITY CHALLENGE PARTNERS FOR 2020

DRAFT FOR COMMENT AND EDITING

— to be contacted and integrated into program from the beginning as full partners designing and monitoring the 2020 Five Percent Challenge.

Please share your contact information, addresses, names to that we can bring them into the project from the beginning.

Transport Infrastructure — Car, roads, streets, parking — on- and off-street

Public transporters — Public transport, school and works buses, taxis, free circulator bus services

Automobile lobbies — Owner/drivers, supporting services

Shared mobility — ridesharing, car sharing, shared bicycles, scooters, hitchhiking, slugging, bus pools, etc.)

MicroMobility (bicycles, scooters, very light vehicles, electric scooters, electric skateboards, shared bicycles and electric pedal assisted, pedelec, push scooters.

Mobility substitutes — Proximity, Telepresence, Telework, peak reduction measures

THE CLIMATE REVOLUTION MUST BE ACCESSIBLE – THIS FIGHT BELONGS TO DISABLED PEOPLE TOO

 Article by Hannah Dines, Extracts Reprinted from The Guardian ,  15 October 2019  . Picture – Disabled group being helped by caregivers. Reykjavik, Iceland. Thanks to Alamy. 

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has done work on gender equality, using “gender focal points”, people who assist in gender-related decisions about the climate. But there isn’t a list of representatives with disabilities, though the outcomes of climate change negotiations will disproportionately affect us. The Paris agreement makes clear its obligation to disability and human rights, but will people with disabilities actually be involved in the discussion?

Civic Plan for a Climate Emergency

Building the 1.5 degree, socially-just city

Discussion document for policy makers & civic leaders

– Paul Chatterton, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK. Full text HERE

This climate emergency is also a ‘city emergency’. Most of the world’s population will soon be urban. Cities are locked in to high energy throughputs, are responsible for about three-quarters of global GHGs and energy use, have ecological footprints larger than their city limits, and remain locked in to high-growth, high-consumption lifestyles.

In the context of growing awareness of the severity of climate breakdown, the central role cities play in this, and the lack of rapid action, municipalities around the world are declaring ‘climate Emergencies’. To date 40 municipalities in the UK have signed such a declaration. Worldwide around 50 million now live in cities that have declared emergencies. This is an exciting addition to city level action through, for example, the C40 Leadership Group and the Global Covenant of Mayors.

World Streets launches 2021 Collaborative Climate/Mobility Action Plan

– – – – – – – – > Working draft update of 12 December. To be finalized over month.

WORLD STREETS is betting its future on the coming immediate-term transition period led by certain ambitious, responsible cities, nations, organizations and citizens in different parts of the world to come together to break the downward pattern of ever-increasing climate stress — and before the challenge to plan and execute highly aggressive near-term initiatives aimed at sharply cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the mobility sector. And doing all this while working with proven tools, policies and strategies that harness cost-effective, readily available, measures, technologies, operational and management competence. And our job is to support them as best we can.

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.

Iceland’s Prime Minister Talks Climate Change and Gender Equality

Sometimes it can be an advantage to be small. You can do things bigger and faster.

Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir in an interview of 25 July 2019 with Ciara Nugent  of Time Magazine. See  https://time.com/5634790/iceland-prime-minister-climate-change-interview/ for full text. (Thank you Ciara and Time for these extracts .)

One of the only government heads from an environmentalist party, Jakobsdottir wants to make the country a leader in climate action too, with an ambitious plan to make Iceland carbon neutral by 2040, 10 years before the target set for Iceland’s neighbors in the E.U. “It can be an advantage to be small,” she says. “You can do things bigger and faster. You can actually change everything in a very short time.”