World Carfree Day: Interview with Eric Britton

September 22 is an important date to remember – it’s World Carfree Day (WCD). Celebrated in towns and cities all over the world, it’s a day when streets are closed to cars and open for pedestrians, pedalers, parties and pleasure. Eric Britton, a sustainability activist, international adviser and consultant on sustainable transportation, is recognised for his work promoting and propelling WCD to<international attention. Much of his work involves co-ordinating the collaborative New Mobility Agenda and World Streets online journal, which encompass a number of possible transport solutions, including public transport, bike sharing and shared space projects. In an interview with Carbusters, Eric shared his thoughts about the problems, popularity and prospects for WCD, and points out the importance of bringing it into the policy agenda of governments in order to improve urban transport sustainability.


Interview by Jane Harding. - Carbusters magazine: Journal of the carfree movement
- http://carbusters.org/2010/07/07/world-carfree-day-interview-with-eric-britton/

New and existing WCD events continue to spread and strengthen in cities and towns across the world. What do you think about the popularity of WCD?
There are many ways to look at the popularity of WCD. If you look at any city where WCDs are held, you will find that the public reaction can fall into three different groups: first, the largest group, are people who simply don’t know a WCD exists or takes place in that city; a second group knows that a WCD is going on, but either dislikes it or chooses not to support it (although their criticism can be very useful); and the third group are the organisers or participants of the WCD. And of course, they like it a lot.

The fact that we have thousands of cities celebrating WCD is something of value and a huge accomplishment. However, we must be realistic – thus far it has had very little impact and it is not considered high priority in the transportation policies of many cities. Currently WCD is just a device to insight public discussion. WCD needs to be worked into the mainstream transportation policies of many cities in order to bring further change and my work will focus on this over the next few years.

Convincing policy makers and authorities to support WCD is a common problem. Why do you think these problems persist and how can they be overcome?
One problem is that there is either none or very little difference between the ways in which WCDs are organised and carried out. Another problem is the current lack of a consistent or specific message with which to bring forward to public policy makers. However, WCD does carry a very important general message: there are too many cars in cities which we need to control and many parts of our cities would do better with fewer cars, but that message by itself is not enough.

WCD has the potential to be a useful tool in influencing a city’s overall policy, particularly regarding transportation. Through my work I try to keep track of WCDs around the world and find how we can make better use of this tool. Having worked and talked with mayors and public policymakers all over the world, it is clear they are very busy and transportation forms just one part of their responsibility. With the current lack of a consistent message and credible proposal, it will always be a struggle to push WCDs further to what we think they should be doing. Therefore, WCD needs to be shown in very concrete terms in order to be taken into the policy agenda.  This could be a small number of well defined recommendations given to public policymakers – ideally, this message should include three points of what people think should and can be done.

Where have you seen WCD work best?
It’s really best to ask the organisers. People involved in the organisation have the best knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. They often work closely with authorities to make one day where many streets are taken over, so it becomes safe for families, cyclists and pedestrians.

A famous example is Bogotá, Colombia, which holds the world’s largest carfree weekday event covering the entire city. The first WCD was held in 2000, and it has since become an institutionalised event, following the 2006 Towards Carfree Cities conference and former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s influence which helped a pattern of carfree activities spread in Bogotá, as well as to other cities in Latin America.

There are many small local events, which are sometimes hard to follow; they fall into three main categories: the first ones have good ideas; second ones are ok; and the third are the clear losers. However, there is another group, probably the most important, which act as instruments of change on public policy and people’s practices in the city. Currently WCD is too abstract, so we need to focus it. The important point is how well these events are done, not how many carfree days are held in a city. But despite not having a very strong concept, it has still spread widely, and by strengthening it, it has the potential to grow much more.

In a world still so gripped with cars, do you see carfree day evolving into a permanent reality?
The ideal outcome of WCDs is that at one point they will disappear, because they are no longer needed. We would have accomplished the objective of softening the impact that cars have on a city. WCD has grown, simply because it is an idea that many people like, not just because of the number of organisations, groups, individuals, or authorities supporting it. Now is the time to come up with more and better ideas that people like and that are powerful enough to become a permanent reality.

There are two carfree “gadgets” which I believe are really useful in helping us achieve this: “Carfree Sundays” and a “New Mobility Week”. These are regular events where networks of city streets are closed to traffic for one day a week, or for one week of the year. With these ideas, I intend to create something similar to the European Mobility Week and to link it to the annual WCD. But a New Mobility Week would have more of a consistent structure and contain “doable” actions for specific cities. I don’t think carfree events should have a uniform approach – each with a different concept and mission – the only part which would be the same in every place could be Carfree Sundays. Eventually these activities would take place every day of the week, making carfree cities a permanent reality.

What is your advice for groups or individuals starting a new carfree day?
My first recommendation is to take time to study what works and what hasn’t worked – to become aware of this sector and not just dive straight in with no background. Anybody in any city can do a WCD, but doing it well involves some research.

I would encourage anyone interested in organising an event to create an attractive website, where everyone can pitch in with their ideas – making it fun and interactive. Using media is a great way of reaching out to people. There is a lot of information on sustainable transportation out there which is too dense for most people to feel inspired. It is important to make it simple, selecting what is interesting and accessible to most people, as well as making it available in other languages.

It is important to talk to people who don’t support the WCD approach (e.g. local merchants and car user groups) and with police who are on the street all the time so know more about transportation than most in the city. Listening to what they have to say will help us understand what can be done to make it more of a success.  Make sure you test your ideas, not simply just to think it is a great idea and do it.

What projects are you currently working on and have lined up for the future?
What I would love to do, in a few years, is to put an end to all my mobility-type activities and pass it onto other capable people to carry on this work. I’d like to spend more time on projects outside of mobility: pursuing my interests on how society works and its problems, ranging from economic issues to ethnic tensions.

For now, I still have a lot of work to do in new mobility. Over the next few years, I shall continue to maintain and strengthen the New Mobility Agenda and all of its subsets, of which WCD is one, as well as the World Streets blog, and to work with colleagues around the world to create local editions in local languages in order to make it accessible to more people.

Another project I’ve already began working on is a series of what I call “New Mobility Master Classes”. This involves bringing together people in different countries with broad experience and who can eventually lead their own projects, in order to create a template model for sustainable mobility. The Master Class might be a week long or last a whole month and we try to involve students and academics working in this field.  The overall idea is to take new mobility apart in the context of a single city, over the course of one month, talking about many different topics related to mobility, with one of the days devoted to WCD. Once the model has begun to work well, then other people in the field will be able to run their own Master Classes. So I’ll be busy!

How do you think sustainable mobility and broader issues like climate change can be connected?
We’ve got a planet that is really suffering from our behaviour. People often talk about car sharing, bicycle sharing and street sharing, but it is important to share information online and to bring people together to discuss these topics. The first gathering of this kind is the World Share/Transport Conference taking place in Taiwan from 16-19 September 2010. It will look deeper into the topic of sharing which has not been talked about much before, as well as studying other aspects such as the behavioural psychology behind it. The important message to spread is that sharing is a great way to meet new people, it’s cool, and it helps save the planet.

For more information on World Carfree Day and sustainable mobility:

• New Mobility Agenda


• World Streets


• World Share/Transport Conference


• World Carfree Day

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Prisoner of car? (Working note from Communications 101)

If it is your firm belief that God is on our side (Gott mit uns) and that we are winning the battle of sustainable transport and sustainable lives, you will probably have little use for anything that might show up on a popular environmental site like TreeHugger. But hey! we are losing, so we need to be prepared to use every trick, talent and channel we can lay our hands on. Here is a piece that appeared in TreeHugger last week that will tell you, dear reader, nothing you do not already know -- but it is the telling of it that is the point. Let me put that in other words: we have plenty to learn from them when it comes to getting our message across to the general public. And that includes thee . . . and me.

Drive No More: 6 Alternatives to Your Car

by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada, Treehugger. Original here.

Photo: Flickr, CC

Do You Want to Go Car Free?
We often write about how our society is too car-centric, and while it's important to improve cars so they're orders of magnitude greener (because they aren't going away anytime soon), it's also crucial to have a wide variety of alternatives to the automobile. What are these alternatives? To some of you they might be obvious - you might use some of them every day - but to others who are just starting to try to reduce their dependence on cars, an overview of what's out there will be useful. Here we go!

Photo: Flickr, CC

1. Buses

Probably the most obvious choice, the bus can either be a great way to get around or a nightmare, depending on where you live. Sadly, in many places there's been a comparatively small investment in bus transit compared to the money that goes into the infrastructure used by cars.

One way to make the bus more attractive is to create more reserved lanes and bus rapid transit (BRT) systems (check out Curitiba's BRT: 2.3 million passengers/day). If buses have to spend too much time using the same lanes as cars, they just end up swallowed up by the masses of cars during peak traffic times and there's very little benefit to taking the bus. But if they can bypass all that, a lot more people will use them.

Photo: Flickr, CC

2. Rail (Light, High-Speed, Underground, etc)

The other big player in public transit, rail tends to be more expensive than bus systems, but it has other benefits, like not sharing the road with cars and trucks and it is easier to electrify (making its operation greener).

Ideally, all cities of a certain size would have light-rail/subways within the city limits, and high-speed rail would link big cities so that people and freight could use it as an alternative to airplanes and trucks.

A national survey of Americans shows broad support for more investments in public transit (which means primarily buses, mentioned above, and various types of rail), and a National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) shows that there's been a 23.5% increase in the share of trips done using transit.

Photo: Flickr, CC

3. Walking

Ok, "duh" you say. But with this one, the problem needs to be looked at from a different angle. Here the decision isn't just to walk or not, because we're pretty limited in speed and range and many people can have all the motivation they want, if they live many miles from where they're going and they have to cross many freeways to get there, it's not going to happen.

The decision here is, on the individual level, whether it's possible to change where you live to make walking a more realistic option. Living closer to the office and family & friends is the best way to reduce the amount of time you spend in a car. Most of the time this means a combination of walking, biking, and public transit.

On the societal level, the decision we need to make is to design cities and neighborhood so it's easier to walk. New urbanism has a lot of tools for this, we just need to use them.

Photo: Flickr, CC

4. Bicycles

Bikes! Another obvious choice, but a lot could be done to get more mileage out of it (pun intended). We know that bicycles could play a huge role in many big cities - places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam have shown it to us - yet bike culture is only starting to get going in most places, and we're far from the much talked about critical mass. Some cities are investing more in bike infrastructure (things like safe bike parkings, bike boulevards, bike-sharing programs, and physically separated bike lanes), but it's still relatively marginal.

Let's hope that transportation secretary Ray LaHood really means what he said, and that other officials around the world will pay attention...

Photo: Flickr, CC

5. Telecommuting

Not everybody can do this, and some bosses still resist it, but if it can work for you, it's a great way to cut on your car use.

Telecommuting doesn't only have advantages, and the relative isolation isn't for everybody, but a smaller environmental footprint is certainly one of them.

Photo: Flickr, CC

6. Car-Sharing

This one might seem like cheating, but hear me out; car-sharing can actually kind of be an alternative to the car. Owning the car, that is. It's been shown time and time again that car-sharing members tend to drive less often than it they owned a car, and they plan their trips better, leading to less wasted fuel.

Paying for each car trip you make is a powerful incentive to use alternatives, even if the total amount of money it costs you is a lot less than if you actually owned a car.

There's some good news on that front: Car-Sharing Membership Grew by 117% in North-America Between 2007-2009.

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Thanks to alert reader Chris Bradshaw of Ottawa Canada, city planner, evnironmental activist, and Founder of Vrtucar Carshare for the heads-up.

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Op-Ed. Kaid Benfield on Vancouver's Carfree Olympic Village

The first and most important new mobility option is: to get what it is you want or need, without climbing into carbon transport. And while we here at World Streets tend to spend most of our time looking at sustainable transport modes and good ways of combining them to create superior mobility packages, we also follow car-free (or car-freer) environments and programs around the world. The city of Vancouver has just taken a giant step in this direction as part of their Winter Olympics package, so let us give the word to Kaid Benfield, Director of the Smart Growth Program of the NRDC in Washington, DC for his views on this.

Vancouver’s medal-worthy Olympic Village, one of the greenest neighborhoods anywhere

[For the full text of this article, complete with illustrations and videos, click to http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/vancouvers_medalworthy_olympic.html.]

Vancouver’s civic leaders believe that the athlete’s village built for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, and the planned neighborhood that will surround it, will be one of the very greenest neighborhoods in North America. I am inclined to agree.

The village is the central parcel in a larger planned redevelopment of a section of the city’s old industrial waterfront called, somewhat awkwardly, Southeast False Creek. When the Olympics and Paralympics are finished, the village will become a mixed-use community called Millennium Water, which sounds a lot more marketable to me.



I haven’t visited the site, but I have sifted through virtual reams of information about it, and I have paid particular attention to its plans and progress for some time now because Southeast False Creek is participating in the LEED-ND pilot. (It hasn’t been evaluated yet but the development is aiming for a gold level award.) The city’s summary information sheet explains the project’s goals:

“While maintaining heritage ties to the past, SEFC is being planned as a model sustainable development based on environmental, social and economic principles where people will live, work, play, and learn. SEFC will be a mixed-use community, with a focus on residential housing. This complete neighbourhood will ensure that goods and services are within walking distance and that housing and jobs are linked by transit.”

The 80-acre site’s mostly mid-rise buildings will provide ample density to support retail and walkability while still leaving 26 acres available for park land, including playgrounds and space for community gardening. There will also be an elementary school and new civic center. Some of the site’s historic buildings (notably including the Salt Building, shown in the photos) will be preserved, along with other reminders of its historic past. Transportation options will include rapid transit, a “skytrain,” a streetcar, multiple bus lines, three new greenways with cycling facilities and, of course, a pedestrian-friendly atmosphere. The site also needed and received extensive brownfield remediation.

Most of the development’s buildings will qualify for a LEED-gold building certification (in addition to the LEED-ND goal for the project as a whole). One of them has been designated as a “net zero” building that will have no net carbon emissions. It will be converted to 64 homes for seniors after the Games. And the developer is aiming for a LEED-platinum rating for the community center that will be the village’s focal point during the Games and the most publicly visible of the neighborhood’s buildings afterward.

Southeast False Creek/Millennium Water will also sport the city’s first renewable district heating system, which will provide heat and hot water to all the neighborhood’s buildings, including those in the Olympic village. It will be the first time in North America that heat recovered from wastewater will provide a primary source of energy for an urban neighborhood. The wastewater technology will be supplemented by solar hot water.

The city began planning development of the site in 1997 and committed to a vision of sustainability in 1999. Eventually it will be home to 16,000 residents. Close to 3,000 will be housed there for the Games.

The environmental accomplishments and goals of the Olympic village (officially Village A, since there is a second athlete’s Village B in Whistler, BC, where downhill events are being held) are summarized in an overview on the Olympics’ official site. In addition to those mentioned above, they include ecological restoration of the waterfront; reintroduction of intertidal marine habitat and indigenous vegetation, and extensive green stormwater infrastructure. As shown in the images, most of the buildings will have green roofs. Other laudable elements include accessible design, job training and procurement for inner-city residents, and impressive (and sustainable) public art, including traditional and contemporary works by Inuit, Métis, and other First Nations indigenous artists from across Canada.

The village’s sustainability features are seen by the Games as part of a larger goal of sustainability throughout the Olympic venues and events, and by the city as consistent with its’ leaders vision of becoming “the world’s greenest city.”

As with any large development, especially infill and especially one receiving subsidies in the context of a recession, the project has not been without controversy. This is well-documented on the Web and was succinctly summarized by Jonathan Hiskes on Grist. The project was planned to be financed largely by Millennium Water’s investors and recouped by them after the Games as its units were sold. But a major source of the developer’s capital collapsed with other financial institutions and the city had to come to the project’s financial rescue (to be repaid when the development sells). There were also the usual construction problems and cost overruns. The financial squeeze meant that, unfortunately, some of the project’s Phase I affordable housing had to be scaled back. In addition, some Vancouverites have long resisted the idea of the city’s hosting the Games at all, and the village became a bit of a rallying point for the opposition.

But now the village has been completed and was handed over to the city on schedule, in November. It has received glowing reviews not just from environmental writers but also from real estate observers who believe Millennium Water will be a huge commercial success when it is handed back to the developer (see, for example, here and here). Based on what we can see, that’s hard to argue with. I can’t wait to see it for myself.

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* For full text complete with illustrations and videos, click to http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/vancouvers_medalworthy_olympic.html.]


About the author:

Kaid Benfield is Director of the Smart Growth Program of the prestigious Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC. – http://www.nrdc.org, He describes himself as "Attorney, recovering litigator, cyclist, blogger, dreamer." He writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/.

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April Streeter ponders six (might be) car free cities.

Friend April Streeter, diligent reporter for the busy Treehugger cars+ transportation blog, called in to World Streets on Monday to talk car free(r) cities. We applauded her decision to try to find a range of very different kinds of cities, pushed a bit to bring Guadalajara and at least one Chinese city, in addition to the more usual suspects, and urged her on with all due caution. Here is what she came up with.

Six Cities That Could Easily Be Car "Lite" or Car Free

- For full article with illustrations, please click: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/01/six-cities-that-could-be-car-free.php

Freiburg, Germany's Vauban development is the most well-known example of a city area that has successfully turned away from car-centric culture. It's a big step that can be fraught with difficulties and also with a huge reward: more people-friendly, livable streets. Surprisingly, there are scores of car-free zones around the globe, but very few cities (we're talking populations of 50,000 or more citizens) seriously and consistently are pursuing the necessary planning measures to move to car free, or even car lite. However, here are five cities and one bonus entry that could begin the transition.

1. Geneva, Switzerland is Rich and Ready.
Earlier in January 2010, Geneva's City Council members voted 2 to 1 to close 200 of the city's streets to car traffic. That's a huge first move put forth by the Green Party but supported by Social Democrats and even the center Radical Party. However, the measure is in no way guaranteed, as it may face stiff opposition from the city's business leaders. They should take note of Copenhagen's move to make some streets car free - business hasn't suffered and in some cases has improved!

2. Davis, Calif. U.S.A. Does Biking Best (Some Say).
O.K., maybe Davis is just a big college town rather than a bona fide "big city" but it's got a few advantages as far as car free is concerned: a relatively good climate, not too many hills, a great bike infrastructure (the city is getting ready to build a 1.7 million bike-only thoroughfare under a major road and considers itself Bike City, U.S.A.). It also has a fairly well-functioning bus system and a sort of stealth car-free culture. Innovations in Davis include a car "lockdown" during the University's enrollment period due to the great mass of bikes on the campus, plans for a cycling museum and a month-long celebration of cycling each year in May called Cyclebration.

3. Inner Paree Would Be Lovely Car Free.
Eric Britton of Worldstreets.org says Paris, France has everything it takes to have a carfree inner city. He lists the city's purposeful gradual removal of parking spaces, and the high cost of inner-city parking as two disincentives for car owners to drive their cars directly into the city, and also the high level of noncar households (60% or more) as another sign that Paris can easily go carfree. Forward momentum? Of course, that plum that is Vélib bike-sharing is great, and Paris' plans to keep expanding the system are enouraging. Paris also has great car sharing and plans to implement electric car sharing with its Autolib program. And then there's Paris Plages, that month of summer when the city turns a portion of the Expressway on the banks of the Seine into an inland beach, with sunbathing, kayaking on the river, people watching...and no cars.

4. Big City Guadalajara Needs a Big Plan.
Make no mistake about it. Guadalara, with 1.6 million residents and Mexico's second largest city, is still steered by the motorized trifecta of car, bus, and truck. In fact, some people think crossing the street is southern-style Russian roulette. Yet Guadalajara has some factors that nevertheless make it a good candidate for a car lite or car free place. Guadalajara has won awards for its quick (2 year) implementation of a full BRT (bus rapid transit system) called Macrobús as part of its "Movilidad Urbana" project. In addition, Guadalajara didn't originate the idea but has taken to heart the Ciclovia approach to improving city streets - every Sunday there's a six-hour stretch when 15 kilometers of the city's streets are turned over to pedestrian and all other non´motorized bike-style traffic. That 170,000 city residents enjoy this Via RecreActiva every weekend says a lot about the city's possibilities as an oasis of inner city car lite or car free living in spite of its current urban bustle. Promising initiatives? A plan to make the Centro Histórico in the inner city a completely pedestrian zone.

4. Malmö, Sweden, Takes Baby Steps to Progress.
Sure, it may only be radical groups like Klimax that are willing to come out and say "car free inner city" is their goal for this southern Swedish city. However, Malmö's city government is taking baby steps that may one day end up in the very same place. The city's premier sustainable housing development Bo01, is dense, walkable, and virtually car free. Your first impression of Malmö if you step off the train at the Central station, is not of a car-oriented inner city but of a bike- and pedestrian-accommodating small town. Steps taken include Bo01, Western Harbor's car free streets, and over 400 kilometers of bike paths for this city's 285,000 residents.

6. Anywhere, China, Could Decide to De-Car.
And the bonus burg? Well, this is a 3D stylized map of Guangzhou, China, but it could be any of a number of China's rapidly developing big cities. As car culture has swept the cities so swiftly, there's still a chance for many of them to fairly easily change direction, and decide to go car lite. According to Carbusters, Guangzhou's Xiguan region of the city still sports very low car usage (less than 1 percent of trips). Pedestrian alleyways predominate. Guangzhou, with 13 million inhabitants, has its own 14-mile-long BRT system, which when it formally opens next month is expected to transport 23,000 passengers an hour!'


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About the author:
In this slot at the end of contributed articles, we generally try to place a few sober words that will permit our readers to know a bit about the author. But this time the temptation is too great, so now you have a short bio note in April's own words.
"April is a former bilingual cocktail waitress who left the warm beaches of Hawaii to pursue an upstanding career as reporter on the new and exciting digital world for MacWEEK magazine in San Francisco. When she finally couldn't stand the thought of writing about one more wireless local area network router, she recast herself as an environmental and sustainability journalist for Tomorrow magazine in Stockholm, Sweden. A few years later, she escaped the Scandinavian chill to become editor of Sustainable Industries magazine in Portland, Oregon, where she today is a freelance writer and Hatha yoga teacher forever on the lookout for a good/local/organic/sustainable/fair trade Swedish burrito."

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Kaohsiung Car Free Days and a Green Transport Program: Low-carbon, high-amenity transport, one city at a time

With mounting visible evidence of the reality and extremely high cost of climate change, people in Taiwan increasingly feel the importance of being a part of the earth. And the city of Kaohsiung has decided to do something about it.


- Dispatch by Ray Hung, Transportation Bureau, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan

Kaohsiung is Taiwan's second largest city with a population of 1,510,000. And it is a busy city. The large harbor makes it an important trade stop along the Northeast Asia/South Pacific passageway. With visible evidence of the high cost of climate change, people in Taiwan increasingly feel the importance of being a part of the earth. The city of Kaohsiung has decided to do something about it.

2009 Car Free Day activities.

Kaohsiung City Government organized the eighth edition of its annual Car Free Day in September this year, urging the public to use and to think about more green transport and experience energy-saving and environmental-friendly lifestyle.

To celebrate this event, Kaohsiung City Government invited the founder of the World Car Free Days, Eric Britton, to join and promote the concept of sharing low-carbon, high conviviality transportation, as a warm-up for the first session of the "Sharing Green Transportation International Forum" which will be held in Kaohsiung City from 16-19 September 2010.

In addition to the traditional city-wide Car Free Day celebrations and cycling events held on Sunday the 27th of September, the public transportation activities through the full new mobility week, including three days free ride of city bus, car-free day unlimited usage of public bicycle and the bus driver's selection, had let the public have more opportunities to take public transportation and develop sustainable public transport thinking.











2009 Car Free Day in Kaohsiung - Kaohsiung's mayor pushing for sustainable transport


Kaohsiung City - The making of a green transport-oriented city

Kaohsiung City Government continues its long term move towards the pursuit of green transport-oriented city.

In 2008, the 42.7 km mass rapid transit system and 24 bus rapid transit road network made the public transport usage percentage significantly increase from 4.3% to 11%.

In order to construct a more convenient MRT road network, Kaohsiung City Government is actively processing the 19.6 km light rail investment operations.

C-Bike: Public Bicycle project now on the street in Kaohsiung

In addition, encouraging commuters and tourists to choose a more environmental-friendly means of transport, Kaohsiung City Government has launched 50 stations and 4,500 bicycles for public bicycle system. (For more on this project please see http://www.c-bike.com.tw/eng/qanda.html)










The Public Cycling System in Kaohsiung – A 365 days a year green transport event

The city is committed to extending the total length of its bicycle paths from the current 110 kilometers to 180 km by the end of this year.

Plans for first World Shared Transport Conference – September 2010

The City of Kaohsiung has during this week of related events committed to hosting an international conference from 16 – 19 September 2009, that will for the first time bring a panel of world leaders working in the field of shared transport systems of many kinds together for an intense three day presentation and brainstorm on this transportation concept which is seeing innovation and rapid growth in many leading cities around the world.

Transport sharing is an important trend, one that is already starting to reshape at least parts of some of our cities. It is a movement at the leading edge of our most successful (and wealthiest and livable) cities.

This International Conference - the first of its kind -- will bring together leading thinkers and sharing transport practitioners from around Taiwan, Asia and the world, to examine the concept of shared transport (as opposed to individual ownership) from a multi-disciplinary perspective, with a strong international and Chinese-speaking contingent.

The concept of shared transport is at once old and new, formal and informal, and one that is growing very fast. Something important is clearly going on, and the Kaohsiung event look at this carefully, in the hope of providing a broader strategic base for advancing not just the individual shared modes, but the sustainable transport agenda more broadly.

Are we at a turning point? Is sharing already starting to be a more broadly used and relevant social/economic pattern? Is there an over-arching concept which we can identify and put to work for people and the planet?

These are some of the issues we will examine with prominent invited guests from the fields of economics, politics, psychology, who will join transportation experts to discuss these trends.

The conference will also delve deeper into specific shared transport modes and their applications in a series of parallel workshop sessions which will include various forms of carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing, taxi-sharing, street-sharing and a number of others, as well as the integration of traditional sharing in the form of public transport.

Places at this event are limited, although for those unable to attend media and web coverage will be extensive.

* To learn more about the forthcoming conference, please visit – www.kaohsiung.newmobility.org
* Or get in touch via email: kaohsiung@newmobility.org

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About the author:

Ray Hung
Traffic Management Center
Transportation Bureau
Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
Email：hideo@kcg.gov.tw

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Car Free Days 2. Thursday: A breakthrough strategy for reducing car dependence in cities

This is the full unedited text of the presentation to the Ciudades Accesibles Congress in Toledo Spain organized by the Spanish Ministry of Public Works, Transport and the Environment, with the participation of Car Free Cities Initiative of the EuroCities program and the Direction General XI of the Commission of European Communities.

Thursday: A breakthrough strategy for reducing car dependence in cities

- Eric Britton, Toledo Spain, 18 October 1994

Introduction

I would like to put before you this morning the rough outline of a proposal for an innovative urban policy project which takes on the dual challenge of rendering our cites more accessible, while improving the quality of the environment and conditions of life for all who live, work and play there. While some progress has been made as a result of a certain number of innovative programs and continuing attention over a period of years in a few places, this is not the situation in most. New means have to be found in order to break the policy bottleneck in the many places that need to introduce major changes in these areas, but which for one reason or another have failed until now to do so.

To explain why, the paper sets out six bones of contention: observations which have come out of our long term program of watching briefs, research and hands-on counsel with cities and trasnport authorities, which amply shows why altogether new approaches are needed to deal with these challenges in most places. It is now clear that major improvements will continue to be unobtainable in most cities -- without major reductions in car use. However, contrary to what has traditionally been assumed by planners, car users do not make rational choices between alternatives, but rather are entirely addicted to car use. The author argues that change on the scale that is needed is blocked in most places because of a wide-spread inability on the part of those concerned (including the general public) to envisage a city and transport situation which is very much different from the unsatisfactory situation which prevails today.

The paper presents an outline plan concerning one way in which a city, town or neighborhood might begin to revise attitudes towards car use: a proposal to spend one carefully prepared day without cars, and then reflect on the results. The author refers to this approach as Thursday. The proposal stresses (a) explicit radical targeting for that one day, (b) a major effort of preparation and consensus building and (c) meticulous monitoring of results with a view to follow-up and fine tuning. Earlier presentations of this paper elicited expressions of interest from a number of cities and groups, and discussions are now underway concerning a first wave of exemplary demonstrations on an informal inter-city cooperative basis to begin already in Spring 1995.

The author is hopeful that this paper will encourage debate, inputs for further improvements, concrete follow-up actions and collaborative programs in many places. Readers are invited to address comments, project suggestions, etc., either via the ECTF ACCESS/New Mobility Library as an open communication to all readers or to us via email at 100336.2154@compuserve.com or telephone: (331) 4326.1323 or Fax (331) 4326.0746.

1. Cities, Cars & Access -- What is Going On?

"Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. The simple needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the complex needs of cities, and a growing number of planners and designers have come to believe that if they can only solve the problems of traffic, they will thereby have solved the major problems of cities. Cities have much more intricate economic and social concerns than automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its streets? You can't."

- Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1961

As part of our long term New Mobility monitoring effort of the cities/cars dilemma, we have over the last dozen years methodically followed the development of promising techniques and leading edge projects around the world in what we and others have come to call centers of excellence. As a result we have been able to locate a substantial number of techniques and approaches that can be of help to those on the lookout for new ways of dealing with the vexatious challenges of sustainable transport in their city, town or neighborhood.

But if you look out the window in most of our cities this morning you have to admit that, with pitifully few exceptions, "excellence" in this general area remains a most scarce commodity. The unvarnished truth is that things look significantly worse out on the street today than they did back in the late fifties. There are indeed places which are doing rather well, those so-called centers of excellence. But they are still relatively few in number and, even in the best, it is fair to say that the battle has been only engaged -- not yet won!

The harsh reality of 1994 is that there are more cars stuck in traffic than ever, for more hours of the day, the streets are more dangerous than ever (particularly for children and older people, never mind the poor foolhardy cyclist), the air is dirtier, public transport has been steadily scaled back, the quality of urban life has considerably deteriorated, and the cost of all this has steadily mounted to the detriment of all concerned. Perhaps worst news of all, while all this has been going, the very context of the problem -- the shape of the city itself -- has been continuously altered, pummeled and stretched in most places, to a point where one is justified in wondering whether we can ever get back to a more reasonable set of transport arrangements.

All of this would perhaps be understandable enough if nothing had been done over all these years in an attempt to make things better. But, irony of ironies, all this occurred at a time when we were devoting a great deal of professional effort and taxpayer money to the goal of solving the problems. If we take a few steps back to survey the scene, what we can see as a result of all these attempts at making things better is: first, that it has indeed cost the poor taxpayer a great deal of money, and second that in most places the basic problems have gotten worse and not better as a result.

Taking all of this together, we clearly have a situation that fits very neatly with Mrs. Jacob's warning concerning our collective incompetence at city building. In fact, if one thinks about it, what we have in the main accomplished in many places has been precisely to unbuild our cities, combining what ultimately proved to be public policies on the one hand with carelessness and inattention on the other, in order to make them less amenable places in which to live, work and play.

2. Why Aren't We Doing Better? (Six Bones of Contention)

After looking closely at these problems in a number of places and for a number of years, I have reached the conclusion that most observers, planners and policy makers are, for some strange reason, not taking fully into account the realities of the situations that exist in most communities. Is it possible, I asked myself, that all these people might be operating on some patently wrong assumptions? Might the reason for our flagrant inability to make the major inroads that are obviously needed be that we are somehow either unable or unwilling to see what is really going on? And if so, what then is the truth of this situation? As I labored over the accumulated evidence, I was able to come up with a handful of observations which I refer to as my six bones of contention. While simple and straight-forward enough in them-selves, together they combine to suggest that some radically different approaches are going to have to be found and put to work in order to make any major inroads on these pressing issues in most places.

1. Everybody Who Can, Will -- Other Things Being Equal -- Buy And Use A Car.

There is massive statistical evidence in city after city and country after country around the world that points up the general veracity of this statement. The policy key in this case is the phrase, "other things being equal", which we shall explore a bit further on in this thinkpiece.

2. However, We Now Know that Cars Don't Work in Cities.

At least not in all cities all the time. It is above all a problem of incompatible geometries. That much is demonstrable and unambiguous. Or, to put it a bit more moderately, there is not a city in the world that would not be greatly improved on all scores (including its economics) if it could intelligently reduce peak car traffic by, say, a factor of ten. (Notice the egregious immodesty of this objective! But as we shall see aggressive targeting is a very important element of the new policy paradigm.)

3. But, We Also Know that Cities Can Work Without Cars

There is enough evidence now to make it clear that there are a rapidly growing number of cities which are not only agreeable places to live in and visit, but which also make economic sense -- despite the fact that the role of the private car has been greatly reduced over the last few years. On the other hand there is no conclusive evidence that suggests that if you take away the cars, the city will fall apart. (As with virtually every point made here, this contention requires qualification. While claiming that cites can work well with many fewer cars, this should not be taken to mean that we believe that any such transition can be handled brutally and without meticulous preparation and concertation. Improperly prepared programs can threaten the well-being of a city, no matter how laudable their ultimate objectives. There is also ample evidence that suggests that any attempt to force such programs through is going to end up being blocked sooner or later in most places -- and rightly so!

4. Major Car Reductions Have Been Successfully Achieved Only in a Striking Minority of Cases

After several decades of experience at the leading edge, we know quite well what is needed in any given place to achieve major car reductions and associated amenity and efficiency improvements. But this turns out to be quite difficult indeed. Here is a shortlist of what is needed to make the transition, based on accomplishments until now:

• Far-sighted and responsible political leadership

• First rate administrators in municipal government and public service

• Competent and flexible technical expertise.

• Fine cooperation with full range of concerned public and private interests in the community

• A highly developed spirit of community and social cohesion.

• Substantial cooperation with outlying areas/extended region.

• An enduring consensus that does not depend on party politics or short term election results

• Great discipline.

• Usually a pretty wealthy city/region.

• And then anywhere from 5 to 20 years to make it all work at the level of detail that is needed to achieve fully the conversion.

Now, if this is the only demonstrated formula for success -- and I can think of no other based on our study of actual achievements -- this is not exactly what you would call great news for the rest of us. How many cities in the world do you think already have or are going in the next few years to have all those pre-conditions for success? Does this mean that we are first going to have to achieve all these major achievements in our cities before making the move to more rational and sustainable transport? Or might there be something that we can do for places that have not yet achieved all of the above?


4. Are Cities Without These Qualities Unlikely to Innovate Successfully?

I am afraid the answer is yes! There have been numerous examples of places that have at one time or another reached the conclusion that something had to be done about these problems, but which then, for any of a variety of reasons, were unable to turn their attempts into something that ultimately was able to change the face of the city and its transportation system efficiency. What one observes in such cases is not successful long term programs, but rather either nothing at all or occasional start and stop measures which remain at best as isolated incidents without ever achieving the broader continuity of coverage and interaction that is needed. Thus, a second rate (or even a first rate) pedestrian zone, shuttle bus service or occasional car-free or "air alert" day does not an New Mobility program, or a happy city make

5. Car Use/Dependence is a "Habit".

This may not sound like a particularly dazzling observation. If true, however, it makes all the difference in the world from a policy and results perspective. It has for many years been cheerfully assumed by analysts and policy makers that cars users are "rational beings" who make choices. The received wisdom is that the user, when bit by the urge to travel and before making a final commitment to his car, first scans the range of available alternatives and, should any of these become attractive enough (or should his preferred historical choice become inconvenient enough), switch over to another mode of behavior. But after years of experience and observation (including of my own very ordinary case), it can safely be said that this is patently not true. Quite another process is involved, including one tremendous discontinuity.

For virtually all of us who have them, car dependence is an addiction, and like any deeply ingrained habit of daily life, very very hard to break! And almost wholly resistant to reason! As with any kind of addict, it is easy to be fooled by what those who are affected by it say, the reasons they give for their choices. There is thus a whole universe of reasoning, words and stated noble intentions on the one hand -- and then on the other the simple, ineluctable facts of actual behavior. The truth though is that our car owner/driver is just one more addict, and all the evidence massively confirms that, like any other addict, he is going to continue to do his thing -- despite his high professions or protestations to the contrary -- right up until such time that he just can't do it any more... (And please understand that we are not attempting to demonize drivers, that is not the point. Rather we are trying simply to understand what is going on, and this is, therefore, neither more nor less than the simple truth of the matter.)

3. The Need for Alternative Approaches to Breaking the Bottleneck


At this point we reach a continental divide. Either the reader agrees that the analysis set out here offers a generally accurate overview of the reality of the situation, or s/he does not. If what we say is true, it certainly suggests that radically different approaches will be required in most places -- if a major breakthrough is to be on these issues made within a relatively short period of time. It would also seem to imply that no matter how much money we are prepared pour into building up public transport infrastructure, new and better vehicles, nicer transit stations, more cops on the beat, improved information systems, expanding the supply of alternative services, bike paths, and dead cheap fares, the only way that most of us drivers are ever going to leave our cars behind will be the day we no longer have that choice.

The next issue that it brings up is: what exactly does this mean for policy makers?

As we shop around for new approaches to do the job, the first bit of reality that we need to bear in mind is that the dominant model of public policy in the western world today is not the mighty sweep of the unopposed technocrat (or despot, if you prefer), but rather a far more messy set of arrangements that we refer to as democracy plus contentious pluralism. Now, if rule-by-decree had emerged as the preferred policy model in the late twentieth century (as for example in the case of Singapore) , we would be able simply to outlaw with the stroke of a pen all car traffic in specific geographic areas and at specific hours. And that would be that. After a few weeks/months of discomfort, whining and scrambling, I have no doubt at all that ingenious humankind would quite quickly figure out how to survive and eventually even prosper in this brave new environment -- leaving just about everybody so much better off that there would be plenty of surplus benefit to compensate any who might actually turn out to be losers.

Seductive as it may at times though, this is of course no longer an option on Europe or most advanced democracies. So let's step back to the real, murky and menacing world that lies crouching out there and see if we can deal with reality, a reality which is above all conditioned by that sixth and last of our "bones" -- the almost total unwillingness of just about anybody in our societies to leave her/his car behind… if she or he has a choice.

Certainly by far the best way for any city or region to deal with these issues is by mounting a broadly supported, long range program of the sort that have been carried out in leading cities across Europe and a few other outstanding places in the world. We have seen, however, that such programs succeed only in situations where extremely rigorous preconditions are met. Furthermore, that where such successful programs have been maintained, one of the most visible results of the overall system change is the extent to which the city has taken control of the car chaos that previously was making trouble -- along of course with the many other things that also have to be done to make such systems work overall.

But what happens in all those places where the mandate for change has not yet received such a high level of support... the great majority? Must they remain mired indefinitely in their overall transport and amenity bottlenecks until such time that all those demanding preconditions have been met? Might there be perhaps simpler some things that can be done to "break the ice", to get all those concerned within the city, town or neighborhood to moving in new directions on these challenges?

With this as a target, I should now like to sketch the broad outlines of a proposal for what I believe could be a relatively easy to implement "policy action project" aimed at achieving major reductions in private car use in one or more towns, neighborhoods or cities, as exemplary demonstration projects. The first and most important objective behind this proposal is to organize and run successful demonstration projects in one or more places which will be directly useful to those communities. The second is to carry out each project in a such way that it can be useful to others who might eventually find the desire and will to try something along these lines themselves -- hence the term exemplary demonstrations.

The proposal is borne from a growing sense of dissatisfaction with both the results and the approaches that have been relied on in most places until now. Dissatisfaction with continued dithering in the face of what are clearly urgent and mounting problems. Dissatisfaction with calls for yet more research and analysis before actually getting around to doing something concrete that might help us in dealing with the issues that press. Dissatisfaction with the results of incremental policies and "solutions" whose only long term impact is to make the basic problems just that much worse.

The approach builds directly on the arguments behind the six "bones of contention". At its core, the proposal is based on the belief that, because of the heavily inertial nature of most of us and of our institutions, it is close to impossible for us to conceive of a future for the place we live in (or ourselves) which is very much different from the realities and constraints of our current daily existence. We are literally blinded by the present. For this reason, in almost all cases we end up locked into the situations in which we find ourselves -- for better or for worse.

With this very human dilemma in mind, this proposal offers one way in which cities, which have somehow failed to make the break with their traditional ways, can substantially alter their perceptions of what they are and what they might become -- but not in a way that will be the equivalent of jumping off a cliff with one's eyes closed. What we are seeking to develop here is a context that will provide new ways of

1. Letting people look at their own city, and then of . . .

2. Exploring alternative patterns of behavior and social organization in a striking and credible way (say as opposed to a modeling or scenario exercise which most often is neither).

In this project the context that we propose is the streets themselves, but this time in a controlled "laboratory" environment that will give all of those who are directly concerned -- political leaders, administrators, technicians and citizens alike -- a collective opportunity to observe, witness, understand and then, against this real world base, decide what they should be doing next. The immediate goal will be to organize such projects so that they that can be undertaken with a broad consensus in the host community, at an acceptable level of cost, and which offer the possibility of adaptation and fine-tuning over time to ensure that whatever is achieved will be broadly acceptable and supported by the community as a whole. Until now this has been no simple task. With the Thursday approach, however, it can become considerably less daunting.

This is, it needs to be stressed, not an environmentalist or Green project. It is motivated by a deep concern with environmental and life quality considerations, but it is also closely attuned to the need for cities to be efficient economic machines as well as pleasant and healthy places to live, work and grow up in. The proposal attempts to be especially attentive to the need for "political realism", and in particular the importance of finding ways of building up the broad base of public support within the community which is needed to ensure the long run success of the program. (A short bibliography of sources which deal with some of the main background issues is available in our Web site at http://www.ecoplan.org. For those looking for more, the bibliographies of those sources offer a strong guide.)


4. Thursday - A Breakthrough Strategy

Thursday is a proposal for a city, neighborhood or group to spend one carefully prepared day without cars. To study and observe closely what exactly goes on during that day. And then to reflect publicly on the lessons of this experience and what might be prudently and creatively done next to build on these.

The point of departure for this exercise is the determination that you cannot usefully engage in meaningful dialogue with addicts: that what you have to do is start treating them in some way. As often as not this means thrusting the poor souls (especially poor in this case, since we are in fact talking about ourselves) into a no-choice situation, at least for a time. In this particular instance our proposed "treatment" will be to find an answer to the following question in three main parts:

•a) Is there a way to get drivers out of their cars in one or more cities...

b) In ways which will be tolerable in a pluralistic democracy...

c) For at least be long enough to allow those concerned to learn a great deal more about the whole complex of things that need to be adjusted and introduced to make a car-less (or, more accurately, less-car) urban transport paradigm actually work?

One of the main tasks of planners and policy makers is (or at least should be) to ask creative questions. This one turns out to be a pretty interesting question indeed: one that presents us with quite a neat set of targets.


Harnessing a Planned or Existing Car-Free Day

There is of course nothing new about a proposal for a car-free day. In addition to a growing number of small city center closure projects and pedestrian zones of varying sizes and sorts, over the last decades there have been literally hundreds of cases of cities that have banned car traffic for a single day, some special event, or during some particular (usually crisis) period. What these projects have in common is that in virtually all cases they are handled as once-off exercises. Typically they are done, endured and quickly forgotten; little effort is made to follow up or build on the experience in a systematic way. Nor or they planned for with any great precision. Talk of them to most of the people who have lived through the experience, and they will either laugh (aggressively) or smile (perhaps somewhat ruefully). The consensus is almost always however that these are obviously approaches which can't work in our city, at least not on any regular basis.

In the face of the inherent conservatism which is the rule in most places, perhaps the least radical car-free experiment will be to make use of some planned event as an opportunity to probe in a structured way for eventual alterations in future policy packages. In this variant, the car-free day is redefined as a collective learning experience with a view to providing new visions of how their city or neighborhood could be organized. In such cases, careful prior study, extensive consultation and concertation, and meticulous monitoring and evaluation could provide some potentially valuable insights and support for future policy changes of perhaps a more permanent nature.

This approach can be carried out at a relatively low level of cost and disruption. The great advantage is that it can help those involved to see their city and their daily lives through an entirely different set of lenses -- on the condition that the community's planners are ready to take advantage of this unique situation. Another is that, since it is based on events that are already planned and accepted, it requires no great effort at consensus building in order to get underway. Despite the modesty of its objectives, however, it must not be assumed that such a project is of only limited value. All by itself it could make a major contribution!

But it is also possible that some places may be ready to consider a somewhat more radical though still basically conservative approach. This is the one that we refer to as... Thursday.


A Thursday Program for Your City or Neighborhood

The "ice-breaking" approach that we present here is called Thursday. We suggest that the day Thursday as a target. because it is important that such a demonstration take place on a 'normal week day' -- not, as often happens, on a holiday or weekend. The reason for this is that what we are trying to create a situation in which people will see their own city under 'normal' circumstances, but with altogether different eyes. If you try to do a Thursday on, say, a Sunday or holiday, you will have learned almost nothing at all about your city. Also, it is important that the project be organized (a) not on a day immediately adjacent to the week-end and (b) rather in the second half of the week than at the beginning (so that people will have enough time to get priority tasks out of the way first). Hence the choice of Thursday.

Here is how such a project might work? There will be as many variants as cities, but here is one possibility. On, say, the first working Thursday of May 1995 our city will undergo its first Car-less Thursday. From 7:00 in the morning to 19:00 at night, no private cars will be allowed on the city street. The run-up to this day will be extremely important and should involve meticulous preparatory work over at least several months or so involving the organizing team and a very large number of people, institutions, players, media, etc., so that all those concerned have plenty of time to get their fully act together for that first fatal day. Subsequent to that experience, there will be a (three month?) hiatus during which time the experience can be studied, better understood, broadly discussed and then fine tuned for eventual next stages or steps.

It is perhaps reasonable to ask, how are all those people to get around in the city on that first Thursday? Will life in the city come to a complete standstill? Will the existing public transport operations crack under the strain? Will stores and businesses just close their doors?

It is perhaps not uninteresting to reflect on how those who live in your own city or neighborhood will handle this situation, with a little planning and forethought. Certainly there will be employees who "call in sick" or just don't call in at all, and there will be employers that will do nothing to prepare for that day and then simply refuse to pay all no-shows. But will that be the majority? There will be a rich array of potential ways of dealing with this exceptional situation. Some will take a bus or bike, others will run or walk, then there is the possibility of group rides in taxis, Park+Ride, special shuttle services, cross-school programs, teleworking, simply taking home some 'home work', using the time to take care of a medical visit to a nearby facility, spend a day with the family, clean out the attic....

The point is that, with enough preparation and collaboration, it need not be the worst day of the year for all involved. For many, it could be one of the best and most interesting.

And for those who live or go into the center, and for all the rest, the importance of the monitoring and follow-up program will be critical. How did you like the way your city looked on Thursday? Were there any important differences? How inconvenient was it for you to deal with it? What might be done to make it better if we were all to agree to do it again?

I shall not, at this point, get into the richness of the activities that could eventually be carried out in many quarters of the city in order to enrich and build on this new fabric of urban life. The point is, quite simply, that what we would have here is already the making of a major paradigm shift -- but, this time, getting time on our side, giving people a chance to adjust to both the constraints and the new advantages of the changed situation, and to make, in due course, what may be some very interesting and creative decisions which would quite possibly never have come up if we had not somehow got things off the dime and moving in a new directions.

This will require a process of deep consultation and activist planning that will bring in (just to start the list) public transport operators (public and private), taxis, police, the people who handle the traffic signal timing, schools, store owners, employers of all sizes and ilks, doctors, social service organizations and groupings, etc. In the final analysis, whatever the limitations of the experience, it will be for many an opportunity to view both their town and their own lives from a new and quite different perspective. On those grounds alone, it would have to be counted as a useful experience.

An All-Cities Thursday Program

One possibility that is now getting considerable attention is that of organizing Thursday demonstrations in a number of places at the same time, either within the same country or even on a multi-country basis. The advantage of such cross-project collaboration will be immediately apparent. Not only will the media impact be potentially much greater, but also the possibility for inter-city collaboration should help to ensure better and stronger projects. And then there is the usefulness of emulation, as cities look at each other, learn from each other, and try to do perhaps just a bit better than some of the others.

What Will Happen After That First Thursday?

A poorly prepared project will -- for sure! -- fall flat. But there is no reason that such a project cannot be done very well indeed. Nor do we recommend it for just any city. The choice of site will be very important. This is, quite obviously, not the sort of thing that can be imposed by planners or central authorities. It must be a project which has the enthusiastic endorsement both of the community's leaders and, in time, of the great majority of its citizens and institutions. If such an undertaking is perceived as being thrust on the city by some sort of distant central administration, it will never succeed. Thus, a Thursday project must, in each case, be the result of a strong social consensus in that place.

Of course, if the results of the trial are considered to be unsatisfactory, there will be no reason to consider moving ahead on this basis. If the project is a flop, it is just not repeated. At worst, the cost of failure was not unbearably high (certainly many orders of magnitudes less than an urban rail project which is unable to attract the targeted ridership or a lot of nearly empty buses scuttling around the city streets or stuck in traffic). In point of fact, even if the experiment is judged as unsatisfactory, as long the initial preparation and the parallel effort of monitoring and feedback are handled well, a great deal of useful information and ideas can be gleaned in the process.

From the outset the idea should be to look for ways to adapt and extend the Thursday program on a more continuing basis -- building on experiences which are considered by the community as successful. Thus for example, once the result of that first Thursday have been analyzed and discussed, a second Thursday project could be organized, say three months after the first. Then if that works the game could change and things could shift into a higher gear. In this stage, the city might move into a situation where the car is out the first Thursday of every month. That stage might last for, say, a year, and will entail monitoring, measuring, discussion, confrontation, education, and adaptation.

The main objective of this stage would be to lay the groundwork for what happens next, one year later, when perhaps the city will decide to begin in September 1996 with every Thursday.....


5. Notes on Implementation

Such a program will best be initiated and carried out individually by each town, city or rural community as a self-organized cooperative venture of a highly spontaneous sort. It is my considered view that any attempt by any external body at central direction or even "orchestration" of what must in the final analysis be highly individualistic and self-contained local initiatives, will only lessen their chances of success. Each "placescape" is going to be unique in many ways, therefore highly resistant to uniform approaches or standardization. Indeed, the very fact that many different variations and approaches are possible will be in the interest of all concerned. The strength of the Thursday program is in numbers, diversity and total reliance on local initiative, thus all centralizing or homogenizing influences must be fiercely resisted.

That said, it will be most useful if some sort of means of communication, feedback and results sharing can be established among the various independent demonstrations. There will be many common elements and needs, and much to be gained through an enthusiastic and totally voluntary and self-regulated sharing among those cities and communities which decide to take part. Here are some of the areas in which cross-city collaboration could be mutually helpful:

• Materials and expertise sharing in general

• Development of activity checklists (e.g. preparatory tasks to complete, organizations to involve, etc.)

• Tool sharing (both in terms of the analytic tools which are needed to put a strong project in place, and then subsequently to monitor its performance, shortcomings, requirements for fine-tuning, etc.)

• Media kits and guidelines

• Peer support

• Networking and communications systems (cross-city, regional, national, etc., including integrated "War Rooms" for information and expertise sharing at different levels)

• Perhaps eventually even cross- or collaborative-financing

In due course there will also be an important "kit building" role, which could bring together all of the best of the practices, materials and routines in such a way that later Thursday projects will be able to benefit from the previous experience of the others. (Kit building, though, we must never forget, is a technique which assists and enhances but does not take the place of individual initiative, judgment or control.)

There will be numerous ways of approaching the networking aspects of these collaborative undertakings. One possibly worth thinking about is to make use of The Commons or similar appropriate WWW sites, but which today serves as a fairly efficient channel of information and communications which is available for all who might be interested. Another will be to encourage existing networks of cities and public interest groups to take an active role in encouraging demonstration and action programs along these lines, possibly as Thursday programs but equally well as projects that they would tailor to the special circumstances of their members and mandates.

This leaves us in closing with the question: What is the appropriate role of central or regional government and other such "external" institutions in such projects? If these initiatives are be entirely locally driven, accomplished, evaluated, etc., as indeed they should be, the answer is that regional, national and even international institutions can help, but in a much more discrete way and with a much lighter touch than has characteristically been the case in the past, where centralized decision-making, purse strings and technocratic projects were the main mode of public sector operation. In projects such as these government (other than local government, whose full and enthusiastic participation holds the key to success) can learn to play a very useful enabling function, which can extend to support in all of the areas indicated in the above list and yet others. This will be a new and quite different mode of operation for many public institutions and agencies, but the Thursday projects could also serve them as good learning experiences, since this is exactly the sort of thing they are going to have to get a lot better at in many areas in the future-- and not just transport.


6. What Happens if You Don't Happen to Be a City?

Agreeable as the idea may be, there will be many who will find themselves in situations where their city or neighborhood will not be prepared to make the leap and try a Thursday project. How for example can even the most willing citizen hope to participate in such an experiment if you happen to live in the middle of Los Angeles, London, Tokyo or any other of tens of thousands of cities where responsible intelligent people will tell you that "it is just not possible here"? (And that will, incidentally, be the first reaction in most places.)

As luck would have it you have a choice. Anyone who wishes can go out and organize their own Thursday project on their own terms. You don't have to be a city or even a small town. Thus, for example, if you are president of a company, you can get together with those who work there and ask them if they are interested in giving it a try. Or a school or a gym or a hospital. Perhaps you will decide with the members of your bridge club, church or karate group that you are all going to try to see what happens if each of you decides to spend just one day without getting into a car by yourselves alone. Or maybe just the people in your family. Or possibly just yourself -- one person alone who has decided that she or he is willing to take a fling to see what it might be like.

There will of course be no one best way to do it. Each person, group, and place is going to have to figure out the rules on their own. In some cases, car pooling and shared taxis may be considered acceptable, in others only non-motorized or public transport. Each grouping will decide its own rules and live its own experience. But the point that I wish to stress is that this can be an individual decision and does not have to be something that comes out of some government agency or very large collections of institutions and interests. This is, quite blatantly, not the sort of approach that will appeal to docile, fatalistic or passive citizens. These are concepts that are going to be picked up only by more thoughtful, individualistic, self-confident individuals and groups. And it is my belief that there are in our societies many more of these kinds of people than most might think.

One of the challenges behind each Thursday project will be to find imaginative ways for all those who decide to participate not only to have their own unique experiences on that day, but also to get together later so that what they have done and learned individually during that fated day can somehow be summed up and inspected from a community or group wide perspective. This suggests a combination of something like individual log books wherein each participant or group can record the detail of their particular experiences, and then some way of adding these experiences up in order o draw some larger lessons from the whole. I have no specific suggestions at this point how the detail of this will best be handled, but I am confident that once the problem has been clearly posed, there will be people and groups who know what to do next. Good organization and careful planning will help, and so too could sensible use of state of the art electronic communications.

* * *

Annex A: New Mobility - 1988-1994 Program Summary

The New Mobility Agenda is an international collaborative program (originally called ACCESS) first established in 1988 as an independent non-bureaucratic support effort aimed directly at the challenge of first defining and then implementing sustainable transportation systems. The program builds on more than two decades of cross-disciplinary research and advisory work with the problems of transport, the economy, energy, environment, industry and quality of life, and more generally with the broader challenges of managing technology in society.

The point of departure for the New Mobility Agenda was the obvious conflict between cars and cities. But that was only the beginning. The next step was to recognize a gradually growing uneasiness that something has gone badly wrong: that private cars no longer work particularly well in cities, or at least not all cars in all cities. This hard fact is proving awkward for planners and policymakers alike. Despite the problems they have brought in their wake, cars continue to perform a variety of functions and are perceived by many people as essential to their daily lives. As a result they have been planned into the system. And now that they are in there, their extreme complexity of function effectively rules out any easy solutions.

For this reason we cannot in most places sensibly talk about cities without cars -- but rather places with fewer and much better managed cars. The problem of cars in cities is, in truth, part of a much broader set of social and technology management issues which are coming into increasingly high relief. The links to pressing environmental and energy concerns are obvious and critical, as are impacts on quality of life, safety, urban form and economic efficiency. More subtle are the links between cars and human behavior, including such problems as urban isolation, alienation, violence, rejection of responsibility, and loss of human vitality, intimacy and neighborliness. A great deal of good work is going on in many places around the world aimed at parts of this complex problem, but much of this is not widely known. And there is a requirement for altogether new approaches which has yet to be met.

It was against this background that the New Mobility Agenda was established, with the goal of developing a long term (ten year), independent and vigorous international collaborative effort, untrammeled by bureaucratic requirements and run on an open basis with creative inputs and sup-port from a wide variety of co-operating individuals, sources and institutions.

Five objectives were set for the period 1989-98:

1. Provide concrete evidence showing how modern communities can work without today's overwhelming and damaging dependence on cars -- drawing attention to leading techniques, groups and places that have successfully tackled parts of the problem.

2. Encourage the development of much broader agendas of issues and approaches to the problems of transport in cities -- thereby bringing into the discussions and solution process actors and interests beyond the limits of traditional transport agencies and specialists.

3. Contribute to improving international communications, co-ordination and ex-changes of information and expertise in the full range of disciplines and approaches involved -- so that each new project is able to build knowledgeably on the experience and accomplishments of the past.

4. Work to stimulate further research, tools development and problem solving as needed to improve our collective knowledge and mastery of these issues -- and find the means to inform and involve the public in both the debate and the decision process.

5. Encourage and contribute to exemplary projects and programs in leading communities, working in close collaboration with highly qualified local partner groups and sponsoring institutions.

The Thursday program is one more example of the sort of activist approach which we believe to be needed.


Annex B. Other Tools To Get The Job Done

Studies, reports, debriefings, conferences and "more research" have been the main tools of trade of university educated policy advisors over the last decades. All are of course highly respectable and have their uses -- but also their limits and abuses. Given these limits and that the issues that concern us are complex and systemic, and further that they involve reconciling the positions of groups and interests which are usually far from identical and often highly conflicted, we must be prepared to try other less "academic" approaches to knowledge-building, communications, conflict resolution and, finally, to the mobilization of opinion and resources that is now required. Instead of always accepting automatically that the right next move is to have a technocratic 'elite' generate yet more paper (and that in a society that increasingly won't read, never mind act on what they read!), may I propose in closing that we bear in mind the powerful educational levels and competence of civil society in 1994 and that we should in the future, therefore, be giving far more importance to such things as ...

1. Standing around and watching carefully what is really going on

2. Insisting always on the use of simple language

3. Looking for ways to heighten the impact of words (written or spoken, and which does not always necessarily mean even more words)

4. Not excluding humor, wit, jokes, irony (& even the possibility of bad taste, if that's what it takes to increase the level of critical thinking and creativity) from policy discussions

5. Using photographs, photo essays, film, architectural renderings, video scenarios, cartoons, posters, drawings and other forms of lively graphic expression and characterization -- to impart greater depth and impact to the issues and realities being faced

6. Using these techniques to illustrate alternative futures and policy options, in ways which render them striking and understandable.

7. Polls, surveys, feedback monitoring schemes which improve awareness of the diversity of needs and views - not as instruments to indicate easily satisfied uniform conditions and values.

8. Creative use of small samples (cheaper, faster and sometimes even more accurate)

9. Imaginative linking of quantitative analysis with more vivid information concerning the real impacts on individuals, families, firms & communities

10. Socioeconomic analysis, studies and portrayals of actual daily life experience

11. "Day in the life of ... " profiles, scenarios, stories, rapportages & other "literary" treatments

12. Books and articles on these challenging issues aimed at informing and involving the general public (as opposed to only the usual specialist or academic readers)

13. Editorials, columns and op-ed pieces (carefully written) to hammer the key points home

14. Games, educational and others, using a wide variety of media

15. Contests, competitions to elicit broader, more vigorous and more imaginative participation in all stages

16. More brilliant use of "commercials", spots, etc., to achieve educational and social objectives

17. Events, books, images, programs aimed at informing and socializing children

18. Finding ways to involve children actively both in the collective learning experience and in the solution process

19. Use of the school system as a resource, to carry out surveys, mini-studies, demonstrations, parent education and activism on these issues, etc.

20. Using town halls, libraries, museums and other public places including the streets themselves as centers of exposition and public debate

21. New techniques of knowledge building (including opening up of the policy process to public participants in new and more far-reaching ways)

22. Active networking at all levels of society, and using an increasing variety of media

23. Electronic bulletin boards, networking, conferencing, new group work/groupware techniques

24. Use of simulations, artificial intelligence, etc. to encourage depiction, emergence, and collective consideration of broader solution sets

25. Innovative techniques of conflict resolution (including iterative adversary pro-grams using video, audio and other feedback techniques)

26. Town meetings & other fora of debate, consensus building & group decision

27. Process-oriented projects involving the semi-structured use of things like brain-storming sessions, roundtables, confrontations of opposing points of view-all oriented to attain specific objectives

28. Cross-project and cross-country support by policy gurus, networks & public interest consortia

29. Demonstrations of new ways of doing things (properly prepared, carefully monitored & flexibly fine-tuned for results)

30. New partnerships with radio, television and the media, which increase public awareness of both issues and trade-offs, as well as direct public involvement in the solution process

31. Active investigation & learning from post mortems of project experience, both successful & other

Thursday, quite obviously, is an approach which comes out of this general way of thinking. But since variety and intensity of effort to promote better understanding and action are vital, we also need to bear in mind that it is only one of many things that are going to have to be looked and tried in order for us to get control of our own futures. As Jane Jacobs put it so well many decades ago:

The processes that occur in our [societies] are not arcane, capable of being understood only by experts. They can be understood by almost anybody. Many ordinary people already understand this; they simply have not considered that by understanding these ordinary arrangements of cause and effect, we can also direct them. If we chose to.

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