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

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.

THE WORLD CLIMATE EMERGENCY IS A MAN’S JOB (Apparently)

Ladies, males and independent thinkers:  Do  you notice anything in particular in the following  sequence of images of a hugely important challenge for our planet, or at least the species? Let’s say, some kind of pattern as you move from scene to scene? Or, better yet, some kind of weird, insistent, let’s go so far as to say sick pattern?

The following set of a handful of images offers a pretty fair overview of the so-called ‘manning table’ for this particular mission, i.e., saving the planet.  

 

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Women in transport: Reducing inequalities in smart mobility in Europe

Andree Woodcock, a Professor from Coventry University, tells us what we need to know about the H2020 TInnGO (Transport Innovation Gender Observatory) project that concerns the role of women in transport and the need to reduce inequalities in smart mobility.  Source: Source: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/reducing-inequalities-in-smart-mobility/73408/

Why is this needed?

It has long been recognised that women (and other groups) are significantly marginalised in transport. Without research in this area, the transport revolution produced by smart mobility will continue to exclude women and ‘disadvantaged‘ groups (e.g. the elderly, those from lower-income backgrounds, with mobility, cognitive, sensory and communication difficulties). Commuting journeys are privileged by transport systems, over those related to home and social and healthcare. The complex, multilegged journeys by women and those in lower socio-economic groups are not modelled; therefore, future systems will perpetuate the same inequalities.

Recent analysis conducted by TInnGO shows that around 70% of the transport workforce are male and since 1945, only 7% of the transport ministers in TInnGO countries have been female. Gendered and non-inclusive discourses are already being used to promote smart mobility solutions, despite the fact that women most use and support sustainable transport. Clearly, this situation needs to be urgently addressed if the smart city agenda is to fulfil its promises of improving the quality of life for all people.

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Article continues: – https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/reducing-inequalities-in-smart-mobility/73408/

Gender Mainstreaming: A Reminder

Gender Mainstreaming is a globally accepted strategy for promoting gender equality. Mainstreaming is not an end in itself but a strategy, an approach, a means to achieve the goal of gender equality. Mainstreaming involves ensuring that gender perspectives and attention to the goal of gender equality are central to all activities – policy development, research, advocacy/ dialogue, legislation, resource allocation, and planning, implementation and monitoring of programmes and projects.

• Source: UN Women: United Nations Entity for Gender Equality  http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/gendermainstreaming.htm

1998. COP 4. Comfortably installed at the Head Table in Buenos Aires

And comfortably installed at the head table in Buenos Aires in 1998. BAU

Notice anything in particular here?  Exception, or rule?

Hmm. Let’s think about that? Let’s think of it as not the end of a story, but the beginning of a new story.

Off we go.

1992 UNCED Earth Summit. Comfortably installed at the Head Table in Rio de Janeiro.

1992, UNCED – EARTH SUMMIT, Rio de Janeiro

NOTICE ANYTHING A BIT WEIRD, PERHAPS A BIT UNSETTLING HERE? (Or is this the way things are supposed to be?)

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.

Battle of Ideas: The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire

Moving cars or moving people? Through the looking glass

A bit of background on The People’s Republic (Wikipedia):

The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire or the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire were nicknames often given to South Yorkshire under the left-wing local governments of the 1980s, especially the municipal socialist administration of Sheffield City Council led by David Blunkett, used by both detractors and supporters of the councils.^[1] The councils pursued a social policy radically different from that of Margaret Thatcher‘s national government, following more closely along the lines of Militant tendency-dominated Liverpool City Council and the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone.^[2] 

One small reason why Tallinn may feel they could use more public transport

To get a better feel for this from the perspective of day to day reality when it comes to trying to get wherever you want to go during morning rush hour in Tallinn, let’s have a look at a report by two Estonian researchers, – by Helen Poltimäe and Mari Jüssi, under the title . . .

Factors Affecting Choice of Travel Mode in Tallinn

Tallinn 2018: Free public transport for all. Dream or reality

The program for the recent Tallinn international conference contains useful information and contacts for researchers, planners, policy makers and others wishing to understand the variety of approaches, projects and perceptions which make up this fast-growing and highly varied field of interest for cities and their citizens around the world.

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.

FPT AND THE HIGH ART OF FREE-RIDING

Stockholm’s professional fare dodgers

For almost two decades a Swedish group of campaigners have defied authority and flipped the passenger-operator power balance by banding together to avoid fares. Their unconventional brand of activism continues to stir feathers and attract stigma – but how does the group justify it?

Around the world, authorities, together with governments and campaign groups, are pushing for increased public transport usage. For their part, people comply, if often out of necessity rather than a personal preference for shared transit.

But in some cities, the price for public commuting is fast becoming prohibitively expensive for low-income citizens. This, together with the argument that more public transport ridership is better for the environment, is why a growing network of supporters are campaigning for free public transport as an intrinsic right of every citizen. Some have taken it one step further, by forming a group of ‘professional fare-dodgers’.

* From a nicely balanced, nicely  illustrated article by Eva Gary published in Future Rail on 1 May 2018 at https://bit.ly/2IFdrV9.  Thanks Future Rail.  Creative Commons Non-commercial share alike  

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.

 

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.)

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.

THANK YOU FINLAND ON YOUR HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF INDEPENDENCE AND EXEMPLARITY: Efficiency, equity, education, democracy, environment, accomplishment, modesty and fresh ideas . . . (You’d be singing too)

Part I: Flashmob in Helsinki

A flashmob choral intrusion that took place on one more winter day in the main train station of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. But what are they singling about?

(A flash mob (just to recall and in case you were out shopping at the time) is an unannounced event involving, by all appearance,s an unrelated group of people who suddenly emerge from the shadows and assemble in a public place, perform an unusual and unexplained act for a brief time, then quickly disperse and continue on their ways.  As you can just see here.)

Part II. A Finnish story

A bit of context in case you your Finnish history needs a reminder. Here you have a brief  introductory text (quickly translate, apologies) to an excellent  one hour documentary that has just appeared on Arte, the French/German public television. (Sadly not yet available in English, so you can test your French, German, Finnish and the striking images which tell a story of their own.)

Why Alternatives Analysis is critical to Penang’s transportation future

Image from http://pgmasterplan.penang.gov.my

Alternatives assessment or alternatives analysis is a problem-solving approach used in environmental design, technology, and policy. It aims to minimize environmental harm by comparing multiple potential solutions in the context of a specific problem, design goal, or policy objective. It is intended to inform decision-making in situations with many possible courses of action, a wide range of variables to consider, and significant degrees of uncertainty.

Since the early 1970’s transportation planners apply a multi-modal and/or comprehensive approach to analyzing a wide range of alternatives and impacts on the transportation system to influence beneficial outcomes

Penang’s SRS ca. RM 50 bn “Transport Master Plan” does not make scientific use of an essential transport planning and decision tool, namely Alternatives Analysis to test and compare alternative solutions to identified mobility solutions (see below). This is a grave deficiency which discredits the entire body of proposals,, methodology and recommendations currently being actively pushed by the state government and their under-qualified  consulting partners whose expertise lies in other sectors than strategic transport planning and policy..

Transportation Innovation and Reform: The Path to Social Sustainability

As wise and balanced a summary as you will find of the fine art of dialogue and engagement when it comes to the hard job of developing and integrating new transport arrangements into a space as varied and in many ways contradictory and conflicted as a  21st century city, in any part of the world.  Bravo! With kind thanks to Christopher Zegras of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, one of the conveners of this event, for sharing this with our readers. (You may also wish to check out the short note of conclusion of the editor.)

Why are we losing the sustainability wars? In transport, in cities, in our lives? Because we are . . .

Consider these irrefutable, unpleasant truths:

There may be successes and improvements in this project, in this  place, in this way, but when we look at the bottom line — i.e., the aggregate impact of our transport choices and actions on the planet  — it is clear that we (that’s the collective “we” including all of us who have in some way committed to or accepted this great responsiblity, this author certainly included) are failing, big time in this challene. And if we are frank with ourselves, we can see that this is quite simply because . . .