November 2009: World Streets This Month

Another busy month on World Streets, our ninth since beginning publication in March 2009. This month we present news and views from colleagues, contributors and sources in Italy, France, Taiwan, Britain, India, Iceland, Canada, Netherlands, the US, and of course Denmark and the city of Copenhagen. Check out World Streets This Month and see for yourself if we have managed to combine information and leads on matters of interest to you, which otherwise you might have missed: and each day in a form which is brief and engaging. World Streets' goal is not only to inform but to challenge and to stretch your mind. Read on to see what the planet's only sustainable transport daily had to offer this month.

World Streets This Month, November 2009:
10,688 visitors from all continents dropped in to pick up a total of 21 original articles and opinion pieces, touching on such exotic topics as Green Transport in Taiwan, influencing traveller behaviour, honking strategies to drive pedestrians off the road, mobility hints for meeting nice people, politicians who can't count, another guest appearance by the relentless Ms. Veronica Moss, AUTO lobbyist, and a continuing drumbeat about the importance of sharing in transport as a strategy for more and better service, better economics and a lighter footprint on the planet. All that with a continuing cycle of articles, questions, images and alternate thoughts on the most troubling run-up to COP15 next month in Copenhagen. A busy month and an important time for our cities . . . and our planet.

To obtain the latest World Streets This Month, in one click. And free!

* Click here to directly call up on-line November postings

* Here for the PDF covering the full month.

* And here to go to the archives which contain all past monthly editions.

Who in the world reads World Streets?

This map identifies the last eighty points that downloaded the journal as of this date. From it you can see where we are hitting: mainly in North America, Europe and increasingly in Asia. That of course is very gratifying.


Gratifying yes, but the hard truth is that we are not reaching much of Africa, Latin America (language problems?), the Middle East or with one exception (a regular reader in Kazakhstan) the countries of the former Soviet Union. There are lessons for us all in this and we here are today trying to work out what to do about this. We have questions.

One of these is to ask: how can we expect to get the necessary broad international agreements needed to cut back on emissions and to create more sustainable cities, if the news, the understanding and the basic engagements are not there? This is no less than the dilemma of Kyoto, past, present and future. So how do we penetrate?

Stay tuned, we have a few ideas on this. Starting with this.

Clue: language editions. The language of the streets of the world is what you hear and read in that place. Sometimes English, more often something else. So to get the message out we need to be truly and deeply polyglot (and interesting and relevant). We have already started.

So for a first step we invite you to check out our new collaborative Italian language edition Nuova Mobilità at www.nuovamobilita.org to see how that works. Next stops, we hope: Spanish and Chinese. With more to follow. But we will take them one at a time and always in close partnership with talented people who care about their streets, their cities and our planet.

SOS. If you care about World Streets read this!

We have yet to find the sponsorship which is needed to keep the journal afloat in 2010. The situation is extremely serious and may well require that we are going to have to close down the journal in December on the last day of the COP15 negotiations, unless we get some support before then. That's December 18th.

So if you would like help us raise funds or otherwise brainstorm on this, please get in touch. I am sure that with energetic collaboration of those of you who come here with interest and appreciation, we will solve this problem and go on to do better yet in 2010. I rather think the planet needs us. Do you agree? Don't be shy now. Get in touch. Lend a hand. After all, it's your planet. We can do it together.

Eric Britton
Editor

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