* * Click map for higher definition version * *
The above map reports the locations of 561 readers checking into World Streets over the last five days. (Of our total 4,484 registered readers as of this date.)
But what about them? Where? And what do they read?
Who do you know who is giving these critical challenges of gender, equity and transport their consistent attention, place after place, year after year and measure after measure in . . . Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Senegal, Solomon, Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tunisia, Uganda, United Kingdom, United,States, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe. And who talk to each other about it?
Have you heard about Gatnet? A community of practice and public policy program on Gender and Transport, addressing the problems of women, particularly Southern women and girls, facing the everyday reality of gender inequality in the transport sector. The program deals with specific problems in specific places in Africa, Asia and Latin America, both cities and in very poor outlying rural areas where safe and fair access is an enormous problem of day to day life, often falling especially hard on women and young girls.
Let’s have a look.
During the early nineteen sixties the famed development economist, Albert 
Hirschman negotiated with the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, part of the World Bank group, the financial support that he needed for an extended visit to several WB development projects scattered throughout the poor areas of the world. The document where he reports his visit was the matter of much controversy between the IBRD staff and Hirschman. One of the major points of disagreement was the latter´s refusal to employ the technique of cost-benefit analysis, then very popular at the WB, as a measure of the success of a project.
Professor John Adams has spent quite some years in researching, thinking, talking and writing about risk, and about risk when it comes to how people get around in their daily lives. This posting is taken from his blog “Risk in a hypermobile world” His attraction to transport problems grew out of his involvement in the 1970s and 80s as an objector at public inquiries, on behalf of Friends of the Earth, to the British Government’s road building plans. See “Hypermobility: too much of a good thing” for a summary of his current take on transport problems.
An article of April 26, 2013,” The Race of Our Lives”(GMO) by Jeremy 
Grantham, is a worthwhile read on your Tablet. Click here for article.) . In part because his basic thesis is that the white horse of hope for the future of our endangered species and planet just might turn out to be the triple whammy of (a) serious autopilot demographic downsizing, (b) deus ex machina help from our extended 21st century brains (think internet and/or Zetabytes) and (c) the bountiful near-term harvest of renewable energy. It’s a pretty good read for your spare time.
Discussion from archives of the New Mobility Agenda as recorded on Sustran Global South on 16 Nov. 2005. Simon Norton writes from Cambridge, UK:
When one introduces shared taxis one has to guard against the danger that they take people off buses and trains (or off their feet or bikes) rather than off cars. If so they will actually increase the number of motor vehicles, and furthermore unless the system is transparent and available to casual users (i.e. one doesn’t have to live in the area, belong to a club, or book ages in advance) they may prevent the development of genuinely comprehensive mobility systems.”
Continue reading
Anumita Roychowdhury, associate director of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, in a wide-ranging conversation with Faizal Khan reporting for the excellent Walkability Asia ( Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities), spells out clearly the inevitability of a non-motorised transport code in India through shocking figures and revealing facts. “We need zero tolerance policy for accidents. This menu of action needs support. Our right to walk is not negotiable.” And on this Roychowdhury is entirely right. On this score we must be entirely intransigent and as part of this to keep pounding away on this important point of citizen activism on every available occasion, until we get the concept of zero tolerance written into the law and respected on the streets. All our streets! Continue reading
Every once in a while an article pops in over the transom, as happened this morning, that provides us with a good, independent checklist of the woes and, if not the solutions, at least the directions in which solutions might usefully be sought to our transportation related tribulations. And this carefully crafted piece by Danish architect Henrik Valeur is a good case in point. His independent out of the box perspective leads him to making comments links and pointing out relationships which take him well beyond the usual transportation purview. And if his immediate source of comment in this article is the awful, the quite unnecesssary situation on the streets of India’s cities, the points he makes have universal application. Healthy stuff for planners and policy makers. Let’s have a look.
Nobody 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 equity-based 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.
Too often when it comes to new transport initiatives, the practice is to concentrate on laying the base for the project in close working relationships with people and groups who a priori are favorably disposed to your idea, basically your choir. Leaving the potential “trouble makers” aside for another day. Experience shows that’s a big mistake. Instead from the beginning we have to take a . . .
This is an unusual editorial. It is entirely concerned with one book published in 2012 called “The Human Quest”
To say this book is important is an understatement. It is hugely important because it shows that the current trajectory of the human species on this planet is on automatic pilot with the self-destruct option initiated. This may sound rather dramatic but the book is based on a very traditional scientific analysis and a strong evidence based logic rooted in the best scientific tradition and especially Swedish scientific traditions. It is a solid, objective, scientific analysis.
(From the World Streets Worst Practices Department)
Dear Eric: This is a great idea, thanks for hosting the “worst practices” page. It would be great to develop this to the point that it actually embarrasses people to take action on some of these worst-case practices.
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The latest news about increasing support of women in leadership positions in transport just in this morning from Hong Kong.
World Streets is firmly behind the movement to bring more women at all levels of society and in all countries into the heart of the process of understanding, planning and implementing fair mobility for all. Since 1973 the editor has been actively engaged in the movement to increase the role of women in the highest levels of leadership in public, private sectors and into the volunteer and NGO movement. At times this has been a lonely vigil, but as the French poet Louis Aragon told us some two generations ago: “La femme est l’avenir de l’homme” (Woman is the future of man). If you believe that, it makes you very hard to stop. Continue reading
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