LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS: THE ART OF LIVING TOGETHER
Our in-process shortlist of articles for 2014 edition of the World Streets Reader. The project is to introduce, order and quickly edit the finally selected articles (the “best of W/S), in order to provide a low cost (less than ten Euros for a paper version, and, say, one Euro for a nicely readable e-version). A good companion for your next train or plane trip. Or just to be read comfortably installed in your armchair. Organized by theme, including: Mission, New Mobility Agenda, The Battle of Ideas, the planet, equity, complex systems, strategies, gender, speed/slowth, Big House, Zetabytes, worst practices, musings, Going Dutch, busy mayors, car free, sharing, continuity, “better than car”, universal access, social space, “free” public transport, haiku, rural transport, economic instruments, land use, civil engineering/environment, deep democracy, behaviour/choices, mental maps, pattern recognition, smaller Asian cities, civil society, deep democracy, media, selling sustainability, In Memoriam (2), and a few more, including winning!. Aimed to provide a good read and reminder for international colleagues, our five thousand World Streets readers, planners, researchers, students, local government, NGOs, local associations, and other engaged citizens open to new thinking..
The above map reports the locations of the 561 readers checking into World Streets over the last five days. (Of our total 7,280 registered readers as of this date.)
But what about them? Where are they coming from? And what do they read? Let’s have a look.
Visitors coming in from North America in the last 48 hours. Do you think this may correlate with something when it comes to policy and practice?
Our 21st century cities and those of us who live and work in them have transportation requirements that have little in common with the historical patterns. Our actual service needs are closer to what we can see in successful car-based systems than the patterns associated with traditional public transport. That is to say, user requirements in this new-life system are for the most part not linear (i.e., many-to-many) , nor strictly time-cadenced.
Normally your editor tries very hard to keep all postings here focused on the important topics which you will find introduced in our original Mission Statement of 2009, but here exceptionally is a more personal short story which raises some puzzling problems. And I may not be the only one in our extended sustainability family who has run up against this particular weirdness. Continue reading
The just-elected new Mayor of Paris, Madame Anne Hidalgo, has prepared a revolutionary sustainable mobility project whereby virtually all of the streets of the city will be subject to a maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr.
The only exceptions in the plan are a relatively small number of major axes into the city and along the two banks of the Seine, where the speed limit will be 50 km/hr, and the city’s hard pressed ring road (périphérique) where the top permissible speed has recently been reduced from 80 to 70 km/hr. At the other end of the slowth spectrum are a certain number of “meeting zones” (zones de rencontre) spotted around the city in which pedestrians and cyclists have priority but mix with cars which are limited to a top speed of 20 km/hr. A veritable révolution à la française.
World Streets, together with a number of our readers and supporters, including city cyclists and others working in the sector, 
have decided to take a public position on obligatory National Cycling Licenses. And that around the world the appropriate agencies and legislative groups, city by city and country by country, will step forward one at a time and when they are ready to pass into their law a requirement that certain road users must take and pass a rigorous National Cycling License examination.
Keynote presentation on the occasion of the Tenth Taipei City Car Free Day celebration. Eric Britton, MD, EcoPlan International on 22 September 2011.
For the full presentation (PDF) click here.
Over the last decade carsharing has increasingly proven itself to be an effective mobility option in cities around the world, serving for well more than 1000 cities on all continents. A key element of an integrated mobility strategy for people and for cities, it is a thrifty transport mode and largely self-financing.
People choose to carshare not because they are obliged to, but because it offers a choice. They do it because they see it as a better, more economical way to get around for a portion of their trips. Properly positioned it has been shown that carsharing can offer significant potential for energy savings, pollution reduction, space savings on the street, and reduced requirement for expensive public investments in infrastructure to support cars and/or conventional public transport. However in the last several years the sector has begun to change in some unexpected ways.
World Streets needs to catch on before my feet get wet.
– Dirk van Dijl, Netherlands
1827 calendar days have passed since World Streets opened its stacks for consultation on 31 March 2009. Ad the results are there for all to see and judge: 1,196 original articles, 128 contributors, 1,365 photographs, maps, drawings and illustrations, 5443 registered readers, from some 149 different countries, and on an average day anywhere from 150 to 250 visitors click in (best ever: 2002). But is what we are doing useful and worthy of support? We asked 100 expert readers for their views — and 101 of them picked up their pens and responded. Continue reading
Today marks the fifth anniversary edition of World Streets. Our first number 
appeared on 31 March 2009 with an opening message by the editor — click here — announcing the targets, intent and proposed method of this new collaborative media venture. On the same day we published our Mission Statement — Say Goodbye to Old Mobility — which you can read here. Today we would like to spend a few minutes with you to review the accomplishments and, yes!, the shortcomings and disappointments of these first five years. And then go on to look out to our hopes and intentions for the rest of this decade. Continue reading
We keep reading and are repeatedly informed that for carsharing to work there must be good public transport, cycling and other mobility arrangements as indispensable complements. In other words, for carsharing to work you have to be not only in a city, but in a certain kind of city. This position has been an article of faith for many carshare observers for more than a decade, and while there is a certain logic to it, upon inspection it turns out there is a lot more to successful carsharing than that.
The second annual Haiku Sustainability Slam is being organized by World Streets and its friends as an ecumenical pagan celebration to the coming Rite of Spring, in part inspired by the exhilarating French annual speak-out program The Springtime of Poets (Le printemps des poètes) opens this year on the 23rd of March. A few words of background to set the stage for what we hope will be your own valiant poeticizing efforts.
lend me your arms
fast as thunderbolts
for a pillow on my journey
Click here for the latest version of the Phase 1 summary report which is 
intended at this point for information and comment by collaborators and others who have indicated their interest in following the Penang New Mobility project. The summary quickly reviews the initial organization and plan for the project, and progress in the second half of 2013. It also sets out the basis of the planned 2014 implementation stage. 
– – >Click here for full PDF version – http://goo.gl/U0qTZp
We understand that in the transport sector this is not a well-known nor much appreciated concept, at least in the positive sense we are trying to develop here. So we are making every effort to share broadly, to invite questions and to clarify. In this spirit I was discussing this program the other day with a bright young woman from the Emirates who is on an MBA program here, who smiled at me indulgently as I asked her views and said: ‘Don’t you understand Eric, life is not fair”. That gives us, I would say, a good point of departure.
We have no money gentlemen, so we shall have to think.
– Ernest Rutherford, on taking over Cavendish Laboratory in 1919
World Streets is an independent, collaborative, public interest platform in support of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives and which, as a matter of
policy, we make freely available to all who are looking to understand, support, and contribute to the sustainability agenda anywhere in the world. We firmly believe that there should be no barriers, and especially not commercial ones, to the free circulation of news, tools, counsel and peer exchanges when it comes to the important issues of sustainable development and social justice. To ensure our full independence we do not accept advertising. We depend on the support of our readers, concerned public agencies, foundations and actors in the private sector to keep going.
The other day the phone rang and I heard the voice of my long time friend and valued collaborator Professor John Whitelegg telling me: “on 8th November I am giving a presentation in London at a conference organised by SNCF. It’s all about London and Paris and what the cities can learn from each other. I will go further (as usual) and argue that both can make a lot more progress on things like bike use, traffic reduction, getting rid of air pollution, zero deaths and injuries etc if they get a lot bolder and start engaging with the vision thing. I will say that Paris can learn from London on congestion charging but I want something quite big that I can say in what ways London can learn from Paris. What are the top 3 things that Paris has done in the last 10 years to deliver a genuinely sustainable transport system?” Continue reading
The Mayor speaks: I understand Professor that you are preparing a major public address on new transport ideas for our city tomorrow. My staff tells me you are calling it “On Building New Mobility Ecosystems”. Now that sounds quite intriguing, but can you tell me in a few words that you have in mind to talk to us about? Continue reading
The letter that follows is, as you will quickly surmise, not an actual communication from one elected official in one case, but rather a composite, the 
distillation of experience that I have had over these last years of trying to push the sustainable transportation agenda in many parts of the world, almost always in conjunction and in dialogue with mayors and other city leaders. As you will see, it is not that they are adverse to or not interested in the concepts behind sustainable transportation and sustainable cities. It is just that they have a great many other things on their mind, including staying on top day after day of the considerable challenges of managing their city — and, in not very long, running once again for reelection. This is the political reality of which those of us who would be agents of change must be aware, that politics is the art of the possible. Now let’s turn the stage over to our mayor:
Sometimes in life things can be simple. Let’s look at one case.
Doubtless the most severe single problem holding us back in the hard up-hill struggle for “sustainable transport” in cities and countries around the world is that so far everyone seems to have a different definition and a different agenda. Google offered 947,000 entries under this phrase this morning and all it takes is a quick tour of the Google News rubric to get a quick education on the enormous range of interpretations of what the phrase means to different people, places and interests. Continue reading
WORLD STREETS __ A New Mobility Action Plan for 2022 