Safe City Strategies for bringing sustainable transport to your city .
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Tag Archives: Consultant/Adviser
Some tools of the trade.
Transport minimization: Bridging needs, time and space in different ways
The TMAPP Planners Toolbox:
Transport/Mobility/Access/ Proximity/’Presence’
To take full advantage of the fundamental structural differences between Old and New Mobility, it can help to reflect on the five necessary different steps of analysis and action suggested by the expression TMAPP – which sets out five alternative views or ways of bridging space, which of course is what transportation is supposed to be all about. These are the essential building blocks of a full-function sustainable transport plan for your city. If you have not integrated the best of each of these essential steps into your plan, it is time for a bit of continuing education.
A COMPENDIUM OF 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, and improve accessability, mobility and quality of life for all.
We often hear that 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.)
SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY’S BITTER PILL (And why most politicians do not want to swallow it)
Maybe it will take care of itself.
An even dozen hard facts that politicians, administrators, accountants and engineers are finding it very hard to accept – but without which they will never be able to lead the transition to sustainable mobility and a sustainable city.
52 BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER MEASURES your city could start to do tomorrow morning to cut GHG emissions, reduce traffic accidents, save lives, strengthen the economy and improve mobility and quality of life for all.
We often hear that 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: What/who keeps holding back New Mobility reform in your city in 2018?
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From the editor’s desk: If you get it, New Mobility policy reform is a no-brainer in 2018. 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.
WORLD STREETS 3.0 WATCHING BRIEFS: 2018-2020
Paris. 28 May 2018 update:
For the latest – v. 3.0 – edition of our long term collaborative and action program, we decided first to review the work accomplished and lesson learned over the first decade (i.e., World Streets v. 1.0, March 2008- March 2018) — and select from that collective learning experience a set of ten strategic policy targets that we intend to propose and support as possible to advance these key elements, building blocks if you will, of what we call the New Mobility Agenda over the coming near term 2018-2020 period.
Below you will find the ten briefs thus far selected, with corresponding URL’s that will take you to a first round of introductory information and further background on each selected policy challenge. As you will immediately see, this is a very eclectic group — and here below are our proposed collaborative projects we intend to discuss, promote and work to advance over the next three years .
World Cities offering differing forms of “Free” “Public Transport”
Here is a list of cities around the world that currently providevarious forms of public transport for free. This resource is extremely useful for researchers, and for further information on any of the indicated cities all you have to do is click the name and a summary follows.
ITDP. Pedestrians First: Tools for a Walkable City
Walkability is a crucial first step in creating sustainable transportation in an urban environment. Effectively understanding and measuring the complex ecology of walkability has proven challenging for many organizations and governments, given the various levels of policy-making and implementation involved.
In the past, Western and Eurocentric standards have permeated measurement attempts and have included data collection practices that are too complicated to have utility in many parts of the world or at a level beyond that of the neighborhood. In order to expand the measurement of walkability to more places and to promote a better understanding of walkability, ITDP has developed Pedestrians First.
This tool will facilitate the understanding and the measurement of the features that promote walkability in urban environments around the world at multiple levels. With a better global understanding of walkability, and more consistent and frequent measurement of the walkability of urban environments, decision-makers will be empowered to enact policies that create more walkable urban areas.
* Source: https://www.itdp.org/publication/walkability-tool/
To download 75 page ITDP report — https://bit.ly/2ItikRj
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About the editor:
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.)
“It’s the pace of the technology meeting the pace that our municipalities move at”
Image: SilentHill
Ouch! And so well said!
These few telling words from Stacy Thompson, director of the Livable Streets Alliance, a transportation advocacy group watching out for the public interest in Boston Massachusetts — in the context of a critical commentary on the dockless bike wars that are presently ravaging cities and challenging governments around the world.
And this of course is what World Streets is supposed to be all about: The Politics of Transport in Cities. Satcy has put our challenge into a nutshell.
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.
Case Study: Lessons from a Stakeholder Engagement Process for Sustainable Transport
Lessons from a Stakeholder Engagement Process for Penang, Malaysia
– Author: Minal Pathak • MIT-UTM Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program 2017
– Commentary by Eric Britton, Professor of Sustainable Development, Institut Supérieur de Gestion Paris
SEARCH THE NEW MOBILITY AGENDA: World wide 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.
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.
SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY’S BITTER PILL (And why most politicians do not want to swallow it)
Maybe it will take care of itself.
An even dozen hard facts that politicians, administrators, accountants and engineers are finding it very hard to accept – but without which they will never be able to lead the transition to sustainable mobility and a sustainable city.
THE TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE ZOMBIE: (It never sleeps.)
— Get ready for WTPP Volume 23.3&4 December 2017,
In which an even dozen outstanding international transport experts take on (and take apart) the Transport Infrastructure Zombie, limb by painful limb.
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.
“Transport Refugees” – Victims of Unjust Transport Policies (From our 2009 archives and worthy of your attention today)
The term “refugee” if used in the context of transportation would normally be understood to mean “the movement of refugees”. But what we fail to comprehend is that for various reasons it is our own transport systems, and the values and decisions that shape them, that are making many of us “refugees” in our own cities? It does not have to be this way.
CONGESTION AS POLICY. (You have seen worse.)
Whether or not congestion is “good” is one thing. But what is for sure is that one way or another congestion is policy, or at the very least a policy option. And in some cases quite possibly a wise one.
Now this has been said many times by many people in many places, yet despite its incontrovertible wisdom the message continues to get lost on policy makers. So in cases like this, we have to take a page out of the book of good people who sell us iPhones and cars, and keep repeating our message.
Today let’s hand over the podium to Kent Strumpell from Los Angeles and see what he had to say on our subject in LA Streetsblog back in early 2008. To this reader it has lost none of relevance over almost a decade. Read on. Continue reading
WORLD STREETS __ A New Mobility Action Plan for 2022 