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.

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

DOING OUR HOMEWORK FOR REYKJAVIK STEPS UP

The following as used in a master class of a course on sustainable development, democracy and society.

Getting a feel for our challenge — so that we can better understand the main dynamics of the fast evolving climate situation in Iceland.

For those of us who are not necessarily deeply informed about the unfolding climate/mobility emergency situation — and opportunities — in that part of the world, here is one way to dig in to the situation.

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.

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.”

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.

MORE HIGHWAYS, MORE CARS, MORE CONGESTION, MORE EMISSIONS . . . ? – Lessons from the learned

Aerial photo taken from above article by Mr. Joshua Woo.

Commentary of  Assoc Prof Ahmad Hilmy Abdul Hamid from the School of Housing, Building and Planning,of the  Universiti Sains Malaysia. (See bio note below and list of scholarly publications)  — commenting  on a letter to the editor by Mr. Joshua Woo Sze Seng that appeared in the Star newspaper  last week on 28 May on the topic,  More Highways, More Cars?:

MALAYSIANS are very lucky to have freedom of expression. Anyone can write anything in the newspaper or social media, barring of course things that insult the fabric of our harmonious society.

Unfortunately, this same freedom also allows opinions to be shared by people who might be clueless as to how things work in certain areas.  Yet, these people appear as if they are an authority on the subject just because they are passionate in their beliefs or they happen to shout louder than most.

When Mr. Joshua Woo wrote as an opinion piece  in the Star newspaper  last week on 2 May,  More Highways, More Cars?:   He opens with the following challenge statement:

Our Personal Choices — and Our (un)Sustainable Lives

I don’t think we can buy the argument anymore that we deserve special dispensation just because we think what we  —  the “elite” — are doing is worthwhile. 

Let’s see. At last count there were already well more than seven billion of us sharing this suddenly very small planet. And let’s say, just to get a crude handle on this, that each of us, whether in Mali or Malibu, makes something like a hundred “personal planet action choices” each day, leading to specific actions which when we had them all up have quite a potential impact on our earth.

Wanted: Crowd-Sourced Transportation Analysis (An open thread for collaborative tool building)

This is the second of a two-part article by Charles Komanoff, activist, energy-economist and policy analyst, looking at goals and tools for finding the right strategy for implementing some form of congesting charging measures in New York City’s crowded streets. He invites comment on his proposed “Balance Transportation Analyzer” tool.

Wanted: Crowd-Sourced Transportation Analysis

CHECKLIST OF KEY TERMS, CONCEPTS AND REFERENCES FOR MANAGING THE CLIMATE/NEW MOBILITY TRANSITION

Checklist of key terms, concepts and references for managing the climate/new mobility transition  (1 June 2019. Text to follow here.)

ACTIVE TRANSPORT: * Bicycles * Bike/Transit Integration * Public Bicycle Systems * Telecommuting * Telework * Walk to School * Walking

Rapid cuts needed to protect billions of people from rising emissions due to increased use of cars and coal.

Here is the Future of Car Sharing — and Carmakers should be Terrified (PS. They are!)

Looking for a share car in Moscow this morning? A sample of the 28k cars waiting for your call

Moscow’s sharing boom shows how quickly consumers can abandon the traditional car.

By Ilya Khrennikov. February 8, 2019

This from Bloomberg rings many bells and is just too good to be passed up for our students and readers.  Right up the middle of World Streets long time position on the steady global shift from ownership to use in the cities/car nexus , it is thus passed on here with thanks to the author and the publisher. The complete article with photos, graphics, a short video and references is available from Bloomberg at https://bloom.bg/2UPplxmz .   Let’s have a look.

ARCHIVES 2014: TRANSPORT SECTOR KEY TO CLOSING WORLD’S EMISSIONS GAP

This essay of  September 2014 by Benoit Lefevre and Angela Enriquez  of the World Resources Institute was written in the run-up to the 2014 UN Climate Summit in New York City is reproduced here in its entirety four years later as part of the extensive reading list which has been developed for our Climate/New Mobility master classes.

The three short sections that follow are notable in our present context by the questions they ask, namely:

        1. Why Should World Leaders Care About Transport?

        2. How Can World Leaders Achieve Climate Action in Transport? 

        3. Setting the Stage for Bold Action in the Transport Sector

With this program we shall try to provide our own best answers, commentaries, to those three key challenges.  Let’s go!

From the Archives: Transport Sector Key to Closing World’s Emissions Gap

by Benoit Lefevre and Angela Enriquez – September 19, 2014

Beijing China: Six lanes plus  Pedestrian overpass

Op-Ed: Is the Urbanisation of Young Adults Reducing their Driving?

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.

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.

“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.

World Streets Archives: Free Public Transport hits the road in Guadalajara

TEN GREAT YEARS OF VELIB’ IN PARIS: 2007 – 2017. Introduction and researcher/student quick toolkit:

Vélib’ station in Paris in happier days – 2008

Vélib’ was for ten years an exemplary large-scale public bicycle sharing system in Paris, France. Launched on 15 July 2007, the system encompassed around 14,500 bicycles and 1,230 bicycle stations, conveniently located across Paris and in some surrounding municipalities, with an average daily ridership topping 100,000 in 2017. (Ridership, other key data to be updated.) The name Vélib’ is a portmanteau of the French words vélo (English: “bicycle”) and liberté (“freedom”).

After ten years of sensational performance offering handy and almost free bikes to hundreds of thousands of satisfied Parisians and visitors every day, the project suddenly went terribly wrong as it was preparing to go into a new phase, and has in the last months crashed out of existence. As a result Paris and the world are poorer places

Why did this happen? What are the losses? Were they inevitable? And what are the lessons to be learned? Yes of course in Paris for the future of shared bikes there, but also in towns and cities around the world who might wish to learn these lessons for their own shared bicycle initiatives.

We here at World Streets, who have been following and riding Vélib’s (and Vélo’v’s) literally every day since opening day in Paris on 15 July 2007, have decided to have a look-in on this unexpected story — and in the coming months see what happens if we can share our observations and findings with our international readers and others who may care to drop in here to see if they can find useful information and views on this strange and most unexpected turn of events. Let’s get started.
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WORLD STREETS NEW MOBILITY AGENDA 2018-2020

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
– William Butler Yeats

World Streets has from the beginning been intended to serve as a journal of record of the difficult world wide transition to sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives.   And as a lively world-wide partner, free resource and multi-faceted toolkit for concerned citizens and decision makers as they try to sort their way through the complexity and contradictions of bringing sustainable transport to our cities and their hard to serve hinterlands.   Many of our seven thousand-plus signed-in readers will for the most part keep their eye on the latest articles as they appear.

But there are others — students, educators, researchers, consultants, those working in concerned government agencies, transporters and other suppliers to the sector,  city planners, activists, civil society, journalists, citizens looking for international background on specific topics — who need to have quick access to what the site has to offer.  Which, it turns out, is quite a lot. Let’s have a look.