Green Drinks: From Beer to Eternity? (Or more than a pretty web page)

When we first set up shop here in Paris some years ago, we thought a lot about creating lively and inviting environments for all kinds of people to get together and exchange ideas and learn from each other in our areas of common interest. But for the most part this took the form of the familiar mix of workshops, conferences, and of our various virtual get-togethers on the web. Then one day in 2007 we learned of Green Drinks, and thought to give it a go in Paris.

Introduction: Our goal back then was to create here in this big and busy city an inviting environment which would encourage serendipitous encounters which cut across the usual professional and disciplinary lines. For us it was important that participation be easy and open, and that it bring in young people and as many women as possible. And a wide range of different kinds of backgrounds and views. As luck would have it, a group of young Parisian professionals agreed to take over the actual running of the project, which they continue to do successfully to this day.

So on the occasion of your next trip to Paris if you want to take the temperature of the green agenda here in all its varieties be sure you check out the webpage at http://www.greendrinks.org//Paris. On the last Monday or each month, the action starts at 19h30 at the Café Epicerie, 38 rue Sambre et Meuse 75010 Paris. you can also check out the organizers blog at www.greendrinks-paris.org.

And oh yes, why don't you give some thought to creating a Green Drinks in your own city. You just may surprise yourself? There are more people and more brains thinking about and working on these issues than most of us would ever guess. Try it and let us know how it works out.

Now let's hear what Edwin Datschefski who was there at birth and is the International Coordinator of Green Drinks has to tell us about how all this came to be.

Green Drinks: From Beer to Eternity?

A bunch of us who work in the environmental field used to meet up for a beer in London once a month. It was a nice gathering, and we always encouraged people to invite others, so you never knew who would be there and they were always interesting people and great connections were made and cool ideas were had. We started in 1990 and called it Green Drinks.

We used to call round the week before and tell people the date and venue, and for a while we tried mass faxing, but it was quite hard work and this was of course just in our spare time and "borrowing" office resources etc. so we were very pleased when email finally became widespread and we could set up an email list to send out reminders.

We also set up a fixed date (second Tuesday of the month) and venue so people could easily remember the rule and also put it in their diaries ahead of time.

In 2000 I set up a website greendrinks.org as an easy-to-remember URL and soon after that we realised a few friends from Oxford were having their own Green Drinks too so we listed them on the website. Soon there were quite a few listed on the website so I handed over organisation of the London Green Drinks to Paul Scott, who still runs it, in order to concentrate on the now-international website. When I say 'concentrate' bear in mind this is all stuff in my spare time, the odd hour here and there.

New York City joined as the first US GD in 2002 and as Green Drinkers travelled the world and relocated jobs, more sprung up. Today in 2010 there are 600 Green Drinks in 62 countries.

I specifically used biological thinking in the design of Green Drinks. I wrote the Green Drinks Code (http://www.greendrinks.org/Start) as a code of practice but also as a genetic code, the DNA of the organism.

Green Drinks is biological in that it is:

Distributed -- there is no central organisation, each city organiser can do what they like and maintains their own list of members.

Viral -- member-get-member is the basic principle -- a simple concept spread by word of mouth.

Adaptive -- each Green Drinks city has its own logo and traits, the ones that work best for its location -- some are a little formal, some rather random, some have speakers to break the ice (like in Scandinvia and some US cities), most are just freeform. The freeform nature of most of the mingling is the key, and this can be enhanced by good hosting and introduction-making on the night.

I think the strangest thing about Green Drinks is that the goals are so vague and the benefits hard to quantify -- but they are undoubtedly there. Sometimes people say we should get some charitable or government funding, but then others will insist that independence is far more important. Of course it's not much of a proposal in conventional terms -- 'We need this funding so me and my mates can go have a few beers together' ...

I've upgraded the website a few times in recent years, and we are flirting with on-line social networking via Facebook, Ning, Twitter etc but there are countless online environmental networks, and Green Drinks is fundamentally about face to face interaction in a room.

I have never made any predictions or even plans about Green Drinks, but I would guess we will continue to expand though this may well slow as of course sometimes cities drop out and that has to be matched with new cities joining up.

I think Green Drinks has some good lessons for other types of organisation who want to grow, and staying informal and ad hoc is a key one of them. Go along to a Green Drinks near you to see how it works, or drop me a line if you think I can help with any ideas on your organisation design.

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Edwin Datschefski is the International Coordinator of Green Drinks, www.greendrinks.org . Edwin's latest book, The Total Beauty of Sustainable Products, is proving to be a contemporary classic, introducing everyone from students to CEOs to the delights and nuances of sustainable product development.

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The Walkmobile approach to understanding transport

One of the major challenges we face when it comes to sustainable transportation is not so much to identify useful policies, projects and approaches but rather, once we have done this, to find a way to sell them to the public. Images and stories are part of this process. And if we are to win the war of sustainable transportation it will be because we are not only technically strong but also that we have these critical didactic and communications skills. Here is a sweet example with Hermann Knoflacher's memorable "Gehzeug" or "walkmobile"

"We are increasingly retreating into enclosed environments, more or less
out of our own choice, while isolating ourselves from an outside
world subjected to noise, pollution and dust created by cars"
- Knoflacher in Die Zeit-Interview of 13 September 2007

The “walkmobile” approach to understanding transport

The “walkmobile” is a high technology reflection project was invented by Hermann Knoflacher, Professor at the Institute of Transportation at Vienna University of Technology. It is a simple frame made of wood and has the size of a car. A belt makes it easy to walk around with this frame.

The idea of the “walkmobile” is to show how much space a car needs and how much city space we are willing to cut from public space and give it away to the group of car drivers. This results in streets where the whole width is reserved for cars and motorbikes, leaving almost no space to pedestrians - as seen on many streets in Pune. If all the pedestrians would walk around with a “walkmobile” occupying the same space as a car, our footpaths will be very fast as congested as streets are today.



This clearly demonstrates that a car oriented traffic policy will lead to nothing but a collapse of mobility in the city. There have been many visualization projects on space consumption of different traffic participants, like pedestrians, cyclists, bus users and car drivers. The result was everywhere the same: non-motorized traffic and public traffic manages with much less space than individual motorized traffic.

If traffic policy continues to concentrate mainly on car drivers, we would essentially lose the space for living and the city would only consist of streets and parking places to satisfy the needs of car drivers. To create a city with good living quality traffic policy has to focus on human beings and not vehicles.

Compared to European countries, the car ownership per thousand people in India is quite low. But the number is expected to grow very fast. Cheap cars are being introduced to get the drivers of two-wheelers to shift to cars (e.g., the Tata Nano). So, it is clear that this can only lead to congestion. But how many flyovers will have to be built over flyovers until it becomes obvious to our city planners that this only worsens the problem?

Instead of making the same mistakes as the West in the last century - a century of the automobile - decision makers in India should learn from their mistakes and look for a sustainable answer. Today’s traffic policy has to find solutions how to avoid the growth of traffic. Before people rethink their use of motorbikes and cars, they need a true alternative. A good working, affordable, clean, safe, reliable and well and maintained broad network of public transport as well as pedestrian zones, parking fares, bicycle lanes and pavements have helped many other cities to solve their traffic problems.



It is as Prof. Knoflacher points out with his “walkmobile”: the cities we are living in should be made for humans not for cars. The space in cities is precious, that is a fact of urbanization. We must not give away this precious space to vehicles but convert it to places with a high amenity value.

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About the Walkmobile's inventor:
Hermann Knoflacher has completed degrees in civil engineering, geodesy, and mathematics. Since 1975 he has held the post of professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1985 he became head of the Institute for Transport Planning. His research focuses on spatial planning, urban planning, and transport planning. He is one of the key contributors to the sustainable transport movement (know as Sanfte Mobilität in German). Since 2004 he is the president of the Club of Vienna. He is also a member of the Club of Budapest and the global pedestrian representative of the United Nations. He has recntly have published a book in German "Virus Auto", whihc he is in the process of tranlsating into English.

About the author:
Robert Obenaus studied Geography in Germany at Humboldt University Berlin and is now working for the civil society organization Parisar in Pune, India. Parisar undertakes various activities of different kinds to promote and advocate sustainable transport. For more information please visit the website http://www.parisar.org.

About Parisar:
This article first appeared in Parisar and is published here with their permission.Parisar is a Pune, India based civil society organization which focuses on sustainable development. Over the last decade or so, its main focus has been the snowballing issue of urban transport in Pune and other Indian cities, working closely with World Streets and other leading groups in the field.

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E pur si muove Casual Carpooling on the streets of America

One of the keys to sustainable transportation is to gain high quality mobility for people while reducing overall traffic. One way for doing this is to figure out how to get more people into fewer vehicles, efficiently. Fortunately there are many ways of doing this, not all of which take a lot of time to build and cost a bundle. Here is one example: casual carsharing. And despite the fact that it may seem a bit odd and marginal, as Galileo Galilei so famously put it: "E pur si muove" (roughly, "they do seem to be getting there"). Tne key to new mobility is to seek and combine large numbers of what may appear at first glance appear to be "small" things. Here's one that works.

Casual Carpooling, California, 26 January 2010

It’s not a system that anyone owns and operates, but it is a system that works. The casual carpools in San Francisco are an ongoing wonderment that keep on giving.

When I get to San Francisco I usually get out and count the casual carpools, at one pick-up point or another. For a couple of hours I sit in the cold morning and watch people walk up or get dropped off, then either line up and wait, or get into the front car in a line of waiting cars. These instant carpools then get to use the HOV lane and avoid the toll on the Bay Bridge, traveling quickly to their downtown destinations. I call it ‘flexible carpooling’.


I have counted carpoolers next to the Safeway at College and Claremont three times over the years: January 2007, May 2008, and today, January 26, 2010. Each time I am amazed anew at the quiet system that, I estimate, saves San Franciscans about 900,000 gallons of gas a year, and something in the order of $30 million in total costs. You can read how I made that estimate, presented as a poster at the TRB two weeks ago, here.

You can click on this link to see the chart that shows how the counts of casual carpoolers have changed over the years, including the count done in 1998 by RIDES for Bay Area Commuters, Inc.

The sweetest part of watching casual carpoolers is the ‘kiss and ride’. In its usual usage this term refers to a drop-off area at a park-and-ride. At the casual carpool line it is somehow more personal, as a couple walks up to the line, kiss, one gets into a car with a couple of strangers and the other turns and walks away, probably heading back to the home-office for the day. Today one kiss-and-walk-away-er was walking a dog.

You should know that this system is thought to be under threat. Tomorrow evening a decision could be made to charge the Bay Bridge toll to carpoolers. This might tip the economics such that drivers stop driving and instead take public transport (BART or AC Transit). On the other hand, it might result in a cost sharing arrangement in the casual carpools, perhaps riders giving a buck towards the cost of the trip.

The last time transport costs changed dramatically was in May 2008 when gasoline prices topped $4.00 per gallon. You can see from the chart that there was a big reduction in casual carpooling at that time. The number of drivers dropped. The line of people waiting for a ride was longer, and many more vehicles took three instead of the usual two riders. (Of course, since this was the only time I counted in May, perhaps that was the normal May pattern. In this unmonitored casual system there are no records of usage patterns that can be compared from year to year).

There is no certainty about what will happen if the toll is charged to casual carpoolers. The additional revenue that BATA will receive if the casual carpoolers continue un-abated will be in the order of $1.5 million. What we really need to do, as interested professionals, is make sure that we know what the impact is. There should be a reliable and complete count over the coming months, and again as soon as the toll is implemented, and again a few months later. The cost of these counts would be minimal, but the value in terms of insights into the impact of the change would be significant, and probably relevant for other jurisdictions.

The most mystical aspect of casual carpooling is the balance. Somehow without any website or fancy technology the number of cars that look for riders is about right for the number of riders looking for cars, even though when you talk to casual carpoolers they say they do not all do it every day. This morning there were 96 carpools formed, so nearly 200 riders got a quick trip to work from that location. This is similar to 2007, lower than 1998 and higher than 2008. Most of the time there was a line of cars waiting, so riders were well served. No one waited too long, and all cars took two riders, except for a couple of two-seaters. Think about how much effort would be put into making 96 three-person carpools in other systems. In the 1998 survey the authors estimated that 9,000 people were using the system each day.


My interest in casual carpooling is that it is a system we should nurture. Against all the odds, this system shows that people do not have to make pre-arrangements to share rides. It suggests a mechanism that could enable much higher HOV formation rates. It offers ideas that might be used to reduce peak hour congestion in lots of jurisdictions around the country.

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Some references:
* On casual carpooling, http://www.ridenow.org/carpool/
* On Slug-lines, http://www.slug-lines.com
* More on casual carpooling, www.flexiblecarpooling.org


About the author:
Paul Minett is co-founder of Trip Convergence Ltd, and co-inventor of flexible carpooling. Invented without knowledge of the slug-lines, flexible carpooling can best be described as a formalisation of that unique method of carpool formation found in Washington D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area (also known as "casual carpooling"). Arguing that for more carpooling we need meeting places rather than databases, Mr. Minett has been making steady progress towards testing of this alternative mode.

Paul Minett, paulminett@tripconvergence.co.nz
Managing Director, Trip Convergence Ltd
www.tripconvergence.com

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