Bad News Department:: Come on in

* * * Click here to see all Bad News postings to date. * * * __________________________________________

Some of our colleagues from various parts of the world have asked us why, if it is our mission to support and extend the objectives of sustainability and social justice in the broadest sense . . . why we have created a "Bad News Department".

Well because we believe that there is no news like bad news (not quite of course but you understand), by which our point is that when poorly thought out projects, programs, policies or measures are given prime time in the media and warm backdrops on the political stage, and likewise when promising projects are subjected to intemperate attacks, it is a good thing for those of us who care about these issues to be right on top of them. This is news which is well worth sharing and eventually joining forces to do something about. Hence the Bad News Department. (No downturn in the BND.)

Like every other part of this program, the Bad News Department is intended to get its content through suggestions and postings of our several thousand watchful colleagues out there on the street in more than fifty countries around the world. So when you have some bad news for us, this is the place to turn so we can share it with everyone. We can then get together take it apart and discuss it under the Comments rubric in each case, which just may prove to be an interesting and instructive exercise. We think that the most important thing about bad news is to get it early. (But of course we rather hope that we don't have a lot of it all the time.)

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Bad News Department is really great idea!

Bad News Department is really great idea! I can say it as a contributor to various magazines (mainly cycling and popular-scientific ones) with 25 years of experience. "Bad news is a good news" approach is popular rather between the evening papers, but who don't likes gossiping?

From the other hand, early alert may help to take countermeasures -- be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Recently I have had in my Department a meeting about the Public Bike project with people from Public Transport Authority. What have been their first words? "The mass loss of Velib bikes forces us to rethink the idea of..."

And -- thanks to the Bad News Department -- I could tell them: "Don't get used too much to this idea. The news is highly exaggerated. We will make our plan real". They were not very happy -- I've got a feeling thet they'll start the project just for to write a report: "Running the PBS is non possible".

We'll see...

Marek Utkin
Warsaw, Poland

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The Changing Context for NGO Campaigning

The consistent two-punch theme of World Streets is that (a) we are losing the sustainability wars (no argument there, eh?) because (b) we are quite simply not very bright. Look, how complicated can it be? When it comes to the issues of sustainable transport we really do know what to do (i.e., get our act together and start to rip carbon out of the system, and do it now). But we are somehow not able to get our fundamental messages across. We also have this communication problem. So when someone like Keith Sutter from Sydney has an idea for us, well we listen and try to learn. Let's have a look and see if we can learn something.

THE NEW ERA OF NGO CAMPAIGNING: THE CHANGING CONTEXT FOR CAMPAIGNING

I was asked recently to comment on some proposed campaigns by an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO). Here are some general comments on the way that the campaigning context today is now much more complicated than it was.

1. From “Broadcasting” to “Narrowcasting”

One change has been the move from “broadcasting” (a small number of, for example, TV stations transmitting to a large number of people) to “narrowcasting” (a large number of TV stations transmitting to a narrow, specific group of people).

I joke in my speeches that if a stranger in a capital city (with a large number of potential radio stations to choose from) were first to tell me about which is their favourite radio station, then I would quickly know a lot about them. For example, a person who listens to a “serious talk” publicly-funded radio station is unlikely to also listen to commercial contemporary music stations

Alongside the traditional media, we now of course also have the social media eg Facebook: even more “narrowcasting”.

In summary, I suggest we have “de-massified” society so that it is now impossible to fashion one standard message that will suit - or reach - all audiences at any one time.

2. Who are the “opinion formers” now?

In the old days, it was usually necessary to reach only a small number of senior people (usually pale, stale, males) to change government policy. These were often called the “opinion formers”: people (usually men) with a disproportionate amount of influence in the media.

Now it is necessary to operate across a variety of media, targeting a variety of people because in a de-massified society it is no longer possible to always see who has the power to influence others.

“You never know which piece of coal blows the whistle”. You can never be sure what event or form of media coverage could trigger an avalanche.

The Susan Boyle phenomenon is a good example. The video clip of her stunning appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” reached Australia a day after it was broadcast in the UK (via Internet users forwarding it on) and by Thursday of the same week it had become the most watched You Tube clip that day in the US. By the following weekend she was in negotiations over a recording contract. She had become a global “hit” in about a week.

In summary, I suggest an NGO needs to use a variety of media to reach a variety of people with a variety of messages (albeit around a common theme). The “down-market” commercial media and social networks are just as important as the “serious” publicly-funded media outlets,

3. Rise of Epistemic Communities

A by-product of the de-massified society is the rise of epistemic communities: where people think the same thoughts and only communicate with each other in that same small group. Despite the alleged internationalizing effects of globalization, we still live in small communities – only now they cross national borders. An Indian legal expert, for example, may have more in common with follow legal experts in (say) the US or Europe, than with the peasants outside that person’s own home.

The global financial crisis is a good example of this. The finance industry all had the same ideas about how to make money and ignored the warnings of “outside” people, for example, those concerned about society getting into too much debt. Meanwhile the financial regulators (often in the same capital city district a few blocks away) failed to do their own job because they were in their own epistemic community.

The implication here is that the urgency that members of an environmental NGO may feel for their own particular issue may be not shared by most other people in other epistemic communities.
In the example of environmental NGO campaigns, most people in western countries would probably feel that everyday life is actually getting better and that there is not much of an environmental problem. They do not share the fears of environmental NGOs which may be worried about, for example, climate change. Indeed, I grew up in post-war London – the evil, thick fogs of my childhood have long since gone and the Thames is cleaner now than when I was a child. I happen to share the concerns of environmental NGOs but I can also see how a person in my situation could easily claim that life is getting better and better compared with what they would have known in their childhood.

The risk is that environmental campaigners speak only to their own fellow members (in their own epistemic community) and so they don’t reach a wider audience.

4. From “Leaders” to “Followers”

Traditionally “leaders” would stake out their point of view and invite potential followers to get behind them. For example Winston Churchill in the 1930s warned the British about the German menace and he was ignored. But then in 1939/1940 suddenly the British turned to him for leadership and he became Prime Minister in May 1940.

Now we have “followers” – leaders wait to see where the crowd is running and then run in front of the crowd and claim that they have always had that point of view. They will often replay back to the crowd the fears of that crowd. As the crowd changes its mind, so the “leaders” will change theirs.

A standard example of this process is the “war on terror”. The risk of being killed by terrorists in western countries has been greatly exaggerated (the average American stands a far higher chance of being killed through food poisoning). But thanks to the saturation media coverage, there is a perception among the public that there is a high risk of dying in a terrorist attack and so the politicians heed that fear by replaying the fears back to the voters and have introduced overly elaborate security measures.

The Washington DC-based German journalist Gabor Steingart has even warned that the “war on terror” is a diversion from the real threats to the US. “…our fears have been spun out of proportion. The Taliban consists of military dwarves and political pygmies. A country like Iran, with the gross domestic product the size of Connecticut’s and a military budget only as big as Sweden’s, doesn’t deserve the attention of the entire American public and its government”. The real issue is not so much terrorism as the comparative decline of the US economy and the rise of the Asian powers such as China .

If the leaders perceive that the environment (or any other issue) as not being of any real interest to the voters, then they won’t to give leadership on it.

5. Rise of “Info-Tainment”

A fifth change has reflected the growing comfort of media consumers. Life is a great deal easier now for most people in all western countries. The appalling poverty and violence that marred their lives has been reduced; even a black man can become of President of the United States (which would have been unthinkable, say, in 1970 only 40 years ago).
This progress has led to changes in the media. In the 1930s, 1940s and then the Cold War (1945-91) the news could kill you. The Great Depression of the 1930s; followed in the early 1940s by the possible invasion by German, Italian or Japanese dictators (depending on where one lived); and then after World War II the threat of nuclear war were all, so to speak, “bad news”.

Now the news is not nearly so “bad”. There has been, for example, a reduction in international conventional warfare. The most dangerous period to have lived in the past 110 years was 1900-50; since then the number of wars and the number of people killed in them have both declined. Terrorism, as noted above, is not a major cause of death in the western world. The “bad” news is in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere all outside the western world – and those areas hardly rate a mention (unless western tourists accidentally get caught up in the foreign violence).

Therefore, we have moved from serious media reporting and discussion of “big issues” and “bad news”, to entertainment items such “lifestyle”, sport and cooking food. The news is a mixture of light information and entertainment: “info-tainment”.

In summary, environmental NGOs began their campaigns in the late 1960s/ early 1970s at a time when western media consumers were also hearing other “bad” news. It all seemed of one piece – the possible “end of the world” by either nuclear weapons or environmental destruction.

Now there is far less appetite for “bad” news. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of the scepticism about climate change – the warnings seem now so distant and so abstract compared with the earlier risks of war. The planet evaded a nuclear World War III and so many people feel assured that the environmental warnings are equally misplaced.

I think that optimism may be misplaced and that the planet is facing grave resource shortages etc. But it means that environmental messages need to be refashioned to be effective.

6. From “Head” to “Heart”

To conclude, environmental NGOs (and all other NGOs) are now operating in a new media and political context. Here is a final comment on lobbying.

Traditionally, NGOs have gone for the “head”: trying to meet ministers to convey their point of view etc. This was a “Buchanesque” world. John Buchan (1875-1940) was a popular Scottish novelist (eg “The 39 Steps”) and then Governor-General of Canada. His many novels depicted a world where the “good guys” (and usually they were wealthy, well educated white men) were well-connected, members of the right London clubs, knew the right people and could muster resources that the average person could not – in order to defeat the “bad guys” (such as German spies).

NGOs lived with a “Buchanesque” paradigm. If they could only meet the right ministers and present them with logical arguments then they hoped to change policy. If the polite approach didn’t work, they could try to get the attention of the politicians with demonstrations.

I suggest NGOs need to move from the “head” to the “heart”. In other words, who actually makes policy? It is not the ministers at the top because they often now don’t really understand what is going on. Life is now so complicated. The skills of politicians are in winning elections and not getting a detailed grasp of the details of policies.

A good example of this process is the way in which “new right economic rationalist economics”/ “free market economics” replaced the traditional Keynesian approach to national government economic policy. The revolution began with conservative leaders in the US (Ronald Reagan) and the UK (Margaret Thatcher) and Labor leaders in Australia (Bob Hawke and Paul Keating) and New Zealand (David Lange and Roger Douglas). The party labels made little difference – they were all reading from similar scripts.

Who wrote those scripts? The “technostructure” - in John Kenneth Galbraith’s phrase (The New Industrial State, 19867) – did the work. The politicians simply did the talking.

Martin Feil, a former senior Australian bureaucrat, has recounted his experiences: “I have never been to a meeting with ministers where advisers and public servants were not present; often the minister’s only contribution has been to say “Hello” and “Goodbye”. I appreciate that captains of industry have private audiences with political decision-makers, but I wonder about the efficacy of such meetings. The billionaire or CEO often isn’t across the detail of what he wants to know or ask for, and the minister doesn’t necessarily know what he is talking about and may have difficulty relaying the substance and purpose of the meeting to his advisers” .

The implication here I suggest is that NGOs need to spend more time with the “script writers” working within the “heart” of the bureaucracy, such as serving on government.

There will still be a need for some NGOs to have an “impolite” approach (such as with demonstrations) because they draw the debate’s options far more out to one end (and reduce the risk of epistemic thinking). Other NGOs can present the ‘heart” with more “moderate” options and so gradually shift government policy.

Will it work if the world is facing a looming environmental catastrophe? Do we have enough time? British writer HG Wells is reputed to have said that life is a race between education and disaster. A century later that is still the case. We just need to find new ways of doing the “educating”.

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About the author

Keith Suter is a futurist and media personality in the areas of social policy and foreign affairs. His first doctorate was in the international law of guerrilla warfare and his second in the economic and social consequences of the arms race. He is a member of the Club of Rome, President of the United Nations Association (NSW) and President of the Society for International Development (Sydney Chapter). He lives in Sydney Australia and can be via webeditor@keithsuter.com. .

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Bad News Dept: Scrapping London Congestion Tax

I really liked the format of the paper, but what I liked best was the Bad News Department!

Just as you have talked about the attempts to detract the success of the Velib in Paris, so also Mayor Boris Johnson’s scrapping of the westward extension of the London Congestion Tax is being used in Mumbai by the car lobby to state that “The Congestion Tax is a failure in London, and therefore it cannot be used in Mumbai”. That it cannot be applied in the format that has been used in London is because of various other reasons, not because the concept per se is bad and therefore doomed to failure. (This was in a lot of newspapers, and my views on the same were also published, but I unfortunately did not make copies!)

Mumbai desperately needs some form of congestion reduction techniques: whether it is fiscal or policy measures, it will have to be tailored to meet our socio- cultural issues, as well as the unique geography that Mumbai has. However, the scrapping of the extension of the congestion tax in London has set back any progress we were making in that direction.

I wonder if any other city has had a similar experience?

Bina C. Balakrishnan
Consultant- Transportation Planning & Engineering
Mumbai, India

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"Worst Practices". Los Angeles on the rocks

It's a fine thing of course to know about "best practices" in our troubled sector, and there are quite a number of programs and sources in various corners of the world that are busy assembling these and making them available in various databases. That is excellent. But we decided that World Streets can make a useful contribution if we take all this from the other end -- and launch a series of collaborative "worst practice" (or possibly just "bad practice") profiles, illustrating different ways to get it very wrong.

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Bad News Dept: US city cuts climate change programs

Here is one more of myriad Bad News examples of public officials getting it very very wrong. In this case Montgomery County council staff has recommended cutting the county’s CarShare program in half. (Montgomery County is in state of Maryland, situated just north of Washington, D.C.)

Will they ever learn? No, not unless we all help them. Which of course is why we are here. (Comments as always warmly welcome.)

Montgomery weighs cuts for climate change programs
By: Washington DC Examiner Staff Writer, 04/30/09 *

Montgomery County officials want to scale back some of the county’s ambitious efforts to reduce the county’s greenhouse gas emissions in order to help bridge a budget gap of more than $550 million.

The county set a goal last year of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and has instituted a number of programs to help meet that goal. But with the county deep in the red, officials now propose to switch from biodiesel fuel to low-sulfur diesel, reduce the number of cars available for a county carpool pilot program and cut funds to buy equipment for telecommuting workers.

Council staff recommended cutting almost $100,000 that County Executive Ike Leggett has proposed to spend on laptops, BlackBerry devices and network hardware so that 25 county employees can telecommute as part of a program designed to cut commutes and the greenhouse gases that come with them.

Senior legislative analyst Keith Levchenko wrote in a memo to the council that he was “skeptical” of the value of spending so much money on the program, because most employees already have a computer and phone at home and might only telecommute a few times a week.

“It is not clear that this is the best investment of dollars to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Levchenko wrote.

County council staff has also recommended cutting the county’s “CarShare” program in half. The pilot program started in January, with the county making 28 cars available for county employees to share at a cost to the county of $1,100 per car a month.

Through April 14 the program was only used seven times, for a total of 27.25 hours, according to county council staff. Reducing the number of cars available for the program from 28 to 14 would save the county $184,000 a year, staff said.

The county’s motor pool said it has stopped using biodiesel fuel in some of its vechicles to save money, and because there have been quality issues with the fuel, which is a mix of diesel and discarded vegetable oil. County officials said the low-sulfur fuel they now use instead is on average 8 cents a gallon cheaper, and the switch will save the county $250,000 next fiscal year.


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It’s not easy being green

Environmental programs being recommended for cuts:

• Biodiesel fuel: County vehicles would return to low-sulfur diesel.

• Telecommuting: Council staff recommends cutting $100,000 for equipment that would allow 25 employees to telecommute.

• CarShare program: Staff recommends cutting this new program in half.
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* Click here for World Streets Fair Use policy

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Roads vs. Streets: Wherein the greater danger?

Michael Blastland plays around with some statistics, usefully!, on roads vs. streets when it comes to accidents and safety  in this article that appeared in today's BBC magazine. (Click here for his article in full and here for the  often quite stinging comments that it has triggered.)  Ours here is quite another focus, but it is interesting to keep our eyes open for short pieces like this.

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Okay, we may be losing this war but . . .

… if you keep looking about you will notice that there is more and more, and better and better, media coverage of the bottom line issues of climate, sustainable development and the role that sustainable transportation can play in the process. Today, for instance, there is an article in America's premier reference paper, the New York Times, in which Elisabeth Rosenthal reports on "Buses May Aid Climate Battle in Poor Cities"

July 10, 2009, The New York Times

Buses May Aid Climate Battle in Poor Cities

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Like most thoroughfares in booming cities of the developing world, Bogotá’s Seventh Avenue resembles a noisy, exhaust-coated parking lot — a gluey tangle of cars and the rickety, smoke-puffing private minibuses that have long provided transportation for the masses.


But a few blocks away, sleek red vehicles full of commuters speed down the four center lanes of Avenida de las Américas. The long, segmented, low-emission buses are part of a novel public transportation system called bus rapid transit, or B.R.T. It is more like an above-ground subway than a collection of bus routes, with seven intersecting lines, enclosed stations that are entered through turnstiles with the swipe of a fare card and coaches that feel like trams inside.

Versions of these systems are being planned or built in dozens of developing cities around the world — Mexico City, Cape Town, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Ahmedabad, India, to name a few — providing public transportation that improves traffic flow and reduces smog at a fraction of the cost of building a subway.

But the rapid transit systems have another benefit: they may hold a key to combating climate change. Emissions from cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles in the booming cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America account for a rapidly growing component of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. While emissions from industry are decreasing, those related to transportation are expected to rise more than 50 percent by 2030 in industrialized and poorer nations. And 80 percent of that growth will be in the developing world, according to data presented in May at an international conference in Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the Asian Development Bank and the Clean Air Institute.

To be effective, a new international climate treaty that will be negotiated in Copenhagen in December must include “a policy response to the CO2 emissions from transport in the developing world,” the Bellagio conference statement concluded.

. . .


* For the full text of this article, please click to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/americas/10degrees.html?_r=1

* See also their excellent slide show on Bogota's TransMilenio at http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/10/world/0710BOGOTA_index.html

* There is a good video on the TransMilenio that you can pick up toward the bottom of the Times piece.

* But if you have any problem accessing it, drop us a line at help@worldstreets.org or Skype us at newmobility and we will arrange to get you a full "fair use" copy.
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A closing thought for you:
There is a not-slight chance that the Times and a number of the best of the long-established print dailies may not be around all that long -- and is it not thus ironic that this menace comes exactly at a time when they are making an ever more important contribution to public awareness of both the problems and the need for the kinds of new and less familiar measures that are definitely going to be part of the new mobility retrofit of our gasping sector? That's the bad news. The good news is that Elizabeth and the growing cadre of journalists and reporters who are running with our message are not about to go away. I am confident they will find other means for getting the news through. And oh yes, we will still be here.

Eric Britton, Editor

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Quick guide to World Streets contents: 1 2 3

The long toolbar just to your left, which many may well leap over as they check out the day's and week's offerings, offers a rich resource of tools, information and references which you may wish to know more about. It is organized in four main sections as follows:

Part 1: Introduction and fast start
Part 2: Organization and content
Part 3: Surfing the Internet for clues (tool kit)
Part 4: Work in progress

Part 0: IF NOTHING ELSE PLEASE READ THIS SUMMARY – Four page strategic background note introducing program and highlights at http://tinyurl.com/ws-sum

PART I: INTRODUCTION AND FAST START

Welcome: First time visitors start here - Serves as main table of contents and basic orientation of the site and its objectives. Worth a scan if you wish to get full value out of its considerable resources. There are already hundreds of articles and comments posted here covering our topic from many different angles, but if we do not have ways to locate and access them, they are just more lost luggage. Part 1 is organized in three short sections:

(1) Fast lane in. Introduces our topic, the New Mobility Agenda, and the unique strategic approach behind it. Unless these basic strategic points are fully appreciated, the journal is merely a collection of interesting stuff on our topic. But there is more to it than that. So please read on here as you come in the first time.

(2) Accessing World Streets. Shows how to access and dig into the full resource base.

(3) Supporting World Streets. How we fund all this work - and how you can help if it is to continue.

We suggest you take the time to click down this top section so as to become familiar with the available tools and information. This knowledge will transform the site from being just an interesting read into a working tool for sustainability.

PART II: ORGANIZATION AND CONTENT

Shows both how to work with and how to dig deep into the site and its vast extensions for your information and working purposes. Probably the best introduction is simply to scroll and click your way down the toolbar, but here briefly are some of the highpoints.

Search World Streets – This excellent combined search engine by Google can be put to work not only to pull up all key word references on the site, but also to reach out into the databases behind all those hundred-plus programs and sources listed under Key Links and Sources.

Free daily delivery via RSS will be straight forward to most of us. I personally tend to use Google Reader for our daily reminders, but the other choices are probably every bit as good. The idea of course is to retrieve all information about the day's offering in Streets in a single concise line or two, and from there have a look if you are so tempted.

New Mobility Building Blocks is not particularly easy to read in this form, but it is meant as a reminder, almost subliminal, of the fact that there are a very large number of modes, approaches and choices that are available to be integrated into your full New Mobility Agenda. (More on this all over World Streets. See the Index.)

Editorial – identifies the team behind the project and offers guidelines for contributors and on our plans for extending and improving this toolset.

Supporting World Streets – How you can get involved and lend a hand for what is, after all, your problem and challenge too.

In Memorium – If you are familiar with the work of these pioneering figures, you will understand why we are here and working to build on the foundation they have so generously given us.

Sentinels - This world map identifies the first one hundred-plus people in more than thirty countries on all continents who have stepped forward with offers to share with all interested latest information and clues from their cities, good news and bad news that has perhaps lessons for others. (For more, click here - http://newmobilityagenda.blogspot.com/2009/03/world-streets-correspondents.html )

Archives – Organized by month, and then lists all postings from back to front. Clickable of course.

Correspondents – List of some of the people reporting on projects, problems, etc. in their cities in different parts of the world.

PART III: SURFING THE INTERNET FOR CLUES

This is wild and often rough. But the student of sustainable transport and sustainable cities may well find it worthwhile digging in here from time to time.

Latest Daily News from . . . World Streets is not the only source of daily information on our topic, albeit our policy focus is more tightly circumscribed than the rest (namely our dogged insistence on concentrating on all that can shape the two to four years directly ahead). You will also find here the latest from our sister publication Nuova Mobilità which covers sustainable transport developments in Italy, the first of our non-English language partner editions. The latest from CityFix (http://www.thecityfix.com/), Treehugger/Transportation (http://www.treehugger.com/cars_transportation/) and Streetsblog (http://www.streetsblog.org/ ) are also posted here as they come on line. And if you know of other dailies with international coverage, please let us know.

Key Links, Blogs and Sources:

And here for your convenient inspection is the latest list of sites and sources that our long term studies and work in the sector have shown themselves to be among the most important sources and reference points. We invite you to have a look and, if you would, to let us know about any programs and URLs you think should be on this list. This will help us all. Thank you.

World Streets New Briefs: Results of latest Google search of key categories: sustainable transport\, new mobility et al.

Video Bars: Call up four sets of YouTube videos based on related key words. Chaotic but can be worth a look.

PART IV: WORK IN PROGRESS (Can easily be ignored for now. Basically a sand box for the team to play with ideas and eventual new components.)

# # #

That's it. A bit of labyrinthine admitted, but for the genuinely curious a useful set of leads, tools, and hints.

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John Whitelegg on The global transport challenge

The world’s transport system wastes lives, health, and money – and is choking the planet. There is a world transport crisis. Three thousand people are killed every day in road-traffic accidents, air pollution from vehicles is bathing our cities in a chemical soup and deaths from respiratory diseases exceed deaths in traffic accidents. Citizens need to take control.

- John Whitelegg, Editor, World Transport Policy and Practice

This would be a high price to pay for a perfectly functioning transport system that delivers people and goods speedily and efficiently but this is not the case. All countries and cities spend a lot of money for a transport “solution” that has failed. In a rare example of global unity and shared experience car commuters in Los Angeles are stuck in traffic jams in the same way as they are in Bangkok, Delhi, Beijing and Rio.

Our highway-based transport systems purchased at huge expense are failing miserably to deliver anything. We have created a very expensive way of organising transport in cities, one that is grossly inefficient and one that exacts a terrible penalty in deaths, injuries and lifetime disability.

This penalty is an affront to human rights. Traffic conditions make it very difficult indeed for children and the elderly to cross roads. Women with childcare duties find public transport difficult to use and the poor who rely on walking and cycling are exposed to more danger than the car occupant. Large sums of money are spent in Delhi and Kolkata on expanding roads, highways and flyovers that can only benefit the richer members of the urban elite. The poor are left to suffer with inadequate pedestrian pavements and polluted air.

Donald Appleyard, in his famous book Livable Streets (1981), described how people living on streets with light traffic had more friends and acquaintances than people in cities with heavy traffic. They lived in more sociable, friendly and community-based environments.

Citizens know this instinctively and seek out high-quality environments away from the noise, dirt and danger of cars and lorries. The problem is that this privilege is usually only available to the rich, which is why 90% of the people killed in road-traffic accidents are likely to be poor, cyclists, pedestrians or bus users in developing countries. Transport has become a socially polarised experience with poor people living in poor-quality environments whilst richer people drive past them, cocooned in their cars on the way to a rich variety of destinations inaccessible to the poor.

The need to lead

Meanwhile, cars and lorries account for about 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions and are amongst the fastest growing sources of these gases. This presents politicians with problems. Most politicians would accept that climate change and all its attendant dangers are at or near the top of the list of things that they think are important – but they dare not “touch” transport.

Most cities, regions and countries want more roads. Beijing would like another five-ring road to add to its existing five-ring roads. Most cities would dearly like an international airport, or a bigger one if they already have one. The World Bank funds new roads in India and China. This locks all cities into higher levels of fossil-fuel dependency and higher levels of greenhouse gas production at the same time as prime ministers make speeches about reducing greenhouse gases. No wonder ordinary citizens are confused about what they should do.

It need not be like this. The former mayor of Bogotá in Colombia, Enrique Penelosa, showed the world that a relatively poor city in a relatively poor country can set the highest standards for transport. He declared car-free days, established a highly reliable and cheap to use bus system (TransMillenio) and built a 17-kilometre bike and pedestrian route to connect poor parts of the city with the downtown area. This stands in stark contrast to most African, Indian and Chinese cities that are investing heavily in new roads and doing nothing for the poor and those who live in polluted conditions.

The Bogotá experience is not an isolated one. Curitiba, Brazil has pioneered an outstandingly successful bus “rapid transit system” and done this, like Bogotá, at much lower cost than a metro rail system and with much wider geographical benefits to the region. London has reduced congestion by 30% with its congestion pricing and Copenhagen has achieved some of the highest bicycle use of any city in the world.

The message in global transport patterns is clear. There are no technical, economic or organisational problems in finding solutions but there is an enormous difficulty in achieving political will. Where real progress has been made this has occurred because of strong leadership by key politicians. This presents us all with good news and bad news.

The good news is that there are very few, if any, barriers to innovative and successful transport projects aimed at creating liveable and sustainable cities. They are not expensive to achieve and they present few, if any, technological problems. The significant barrier everywhere is political will. The London congestion charge would not have gone ahead were it not for the unusual drive, ambition and single-mindedness of the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.

Werner Broeg in Munich has carried out research around the world on politicians and he has found that in most cases politicians have established views about traffic and transport characterised by a belief that everyone wants to drive, that the car is the most desirable mode of transport and that anything perceived of as anti-car will result in loss of political office.

Another road is possible

Broeg’s work shows that politicians routinely underestimate the appetite of the electorate for radical change. Citizens would like to see more public transport, walking and cycling and would like to see more convivial and sociable use of public space. Citizens are willing to reduce car trips given the right information, incentives and support. In York, England a project aimed at reducing car trips produced a 16% reduction in these trips in a six-month period in its target group.

All this points to the need for a change in worldview underwritten by citizen action. It is possible to create highly desirable city living spaces, to eliminate deaths and injuries on the roads and to reduce obesity and greenhouse gases – and to do this at much lower cost than building roads, which makes the problems worse. The way forward is citizen action and the generation of enlightened politicians. We are still in the foothills of understanding how to move in this direction.

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John Whitelegg is visiting Professor of Sustainable Transport at Liverpool John Moores University and Professor of Sustainable Development at University of York's Stockholm Environment Institute, and is founder and editor of the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice. John is a local councillor in Lancaster, and Leader of the North West (of England) Green Party.

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Archives: This piece written by John Whitelegg, editor in chief and founder of our (older) sister publication the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice (founded in 1993), appeared back in 2005 as part of openDemocracy’s online debate on the politics of climate change. The debate was developed in partnership with the British Council as part of their ZeroCarbonCity initiative - a two year global campaign to raise awareness and stimulate debate around the challenges of climate change. His analysis and proposals are every bit as pertinent, and urgent, today as they were back then. But here we are, not just two years later but 2x2 years later, and to be perfectly honest there is no sign of relief in sight.

What is holding us back? A knowledge deficit? A leadership deficit? A communications deficit? At least in part an inability of those who fully understand the topic to communicate to the public at large? Back to work, eh?

And in very much this spirit John welcomes your suggestions for authors, articles and commentaries on the challenges of sustainable transport in WTPP. You can communicate your ideas to him directly via j.whitelegg@btinternet.com or Skype: johnwhitelegg.

The editor

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Bad News Dept. Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret

"We are a generation of great talkers."

How optimistic can one reasonably be concerning our ability at this point to meet the enormous challenges facing our sector and the planet in time to make the needed big differences in the years ahead? Here are two comments on this that were made back in 1996, subsequent to a high level international conference on just this subject. Each runs about one minute:

* Try this "dirty secret" comment from 1996 - Click here
* And this "what next" comment - Click here

Sometimes it can help to remember the past. Listen for example to this one minute extract from a presentation given by the editor to a planning session of the OECD Environment Directorate on the occasion of a review of the accomplishments of the high level 1996 Vancouver Conference, "Towards Sustainable Transportation". That meeting, in the words of the OECD "brought together over 400 policy-makers, governments and NGO representatives to assess the state of the art knowledge in reducing transport's environmental impacts and to chart a path towards more environmentally sustainable transport systems". And what exactly did those "400 policy-makers, governments and NGO representatives" accomplish, sustainable transportation-wise?

* Click here for 1996 audio file.

1996 text accompanying Dirty Secret presentation:

That, in our words, is Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret. Worse yet, the sad truth is it does appear to be not just a transient anomaly but rather a sign of our times, of our generation, of our egregious (un)willingness to organize ourselves and get around to doing (a lot) better.

Check out the leading edge of the research, the many related web sites and all the conferences on global warming, carbon dioxide build-up, ozone depletion, and the rest, and one comes to a pretty simple, pretty solid conclusion. From an unbiased eco-perspective we are misbehaving very badly indeed. And what is worse yet is that, rhetoric aside, there is little out there on the radar screen that promises much better. Indeed the numbers all suggest that things are going from bad to worse. Emissions targets are being timidly set, after a huge amount of hemming and hawing. And then flagrantly missed. What a bad, what an inexcusable joke.

That, in our words, is Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret.

I see this presentation as a much needed call to a more thoughtful, more innovative, more layered ("packages of measures"), more open, and more technology-assisted approach to the challenges of sustainability in a frankly non-sustainable world -- a world of people, habits and political arrangements that to all appearances has no real intention to make the fundamental changes that are needed for the planet and in our daily lives.

I ask you, what are the differences between the way we are looking at all this today, and back in 1996? Have we made any notable progress over these thirteen long years?

No certainly not. So what we need to do now to kick-start the system? (The system, incidentally being us.)

Your comments and ideas on this are as always warmly invited. And for the rest, back to work.

Your faithful editor

PS. Here in closing is a remark and proposal I made to the meeting by way of activation and follow-up -- click here for the one minute audio file. It was not well received. Check it out here to see why.

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Locked in Suburbia: Is there life after Autopia?

Something like ten percent of our lonely planet's population are today thoroughly locked in -- or at least think they are -- to an "automotive life style".   While in barely two generations  the earth's population has  tripled, the automotive age has, step by silent surreptitious step, changed the way we live -- and in the process made us prisoners of just that technology that was supposed to make us free forever. That's a bad joke and bad news. But there is worse yet, and it comes in two ugly bites. For starters, in addition to the ten percent of us already hapless prisoners of our cars, another twenty percent of our soon seven billion brothers and sisters are standing in line eagerly in the hope of getting  locked in as quickly as possible. And as if that were not bad enough, the consensus among most of the experts and policy makers is that our goose is forever cooked, and there is little anybody  can do about it. Well, maybe not. Spend some time this Monday morning with Paul Mees, as he attacks this received belief and suggests . . . Well, why don't I just get out of the way and let Paul speak for himself.

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Climate of Denial: Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?

From the New York Times, 22 June 2011: "Former Vice President Al Gore sharply criticized President Obama as lacking leadership on climate changein a magazine essay published online Wednesday, saying his policies had been little more effective than those of President George W. Bush. In the 7,000-word article in Rolling Stone, Mr. Gore said . . . "

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Master of None: The Lahore Transport Master Plan

As we read Hassaan Ghazali's clear-eyed commentary on the short-comings of the Lahore Transport Master Plan, and the process behind it, it is natural enough that we from other parts of the world think of it as a saga that typifies that city, that country and that part of the world. He tells us that "role of planning in urban development has always been our Achilles heel", which I am sure is the case, But whoa, if we think about it we have to admit that there are all too few cities in the world in which these challenges have been all that well handled. We are all in fact involved in a learning process, and with a little luck we will be able to learn from each other So let's hear what Hassaan has to tell us about Lahore, without forgetting for a minute he is sharing with us a story and a challenge that we all face.

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Mr. Meter on America's "Cash for Clunkers"

If matters of climate, sustainable transportation and careful use of scarce resources are close to your heart, and you happen to be European, you may have some reserves about your country's ecologically billed, and energetically buttressed "Cash for Clunkers" (in more polite Euro language of course) program. Let a couple of Americans energy policy experts help you feel a bit less embarrassed.

Before you dig in, a summary:
Schipper's real concerns in this article published earlier this week in the Washingtom Post are these: First, the CO2 saved come principally because the cars bought under C4C are slightly more fuel economic than others bought. But the CO2 saved over the lifetime of the new car is extremely expensive, hundreds of dollars per tonne. If Americans are whining over cap-and-trade or a carbon tax in the tens of dollars per tonne, why embrace something so much more expensive for the taxpayer. And at the end of the day C4C doesn't fix transport, it only fixes a tiny bit of CO2. Schipper is worried that Americans will now set back and breath a sigh of relief, when the real work lies ahead.

And as to our European friends, the situation is no less (I choose my word) stupid. See the Associated Press piece below summarizing the state of play of C4C in eleven European cities. Stupidity is clearly viral.

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When It Comes to Being Green, Cash for Clunkers Is a Lemon

If you think the Cash for Clunkers program is confusing for dealers and buyers, you should try figuring out its impact on fuel use or carbon emissions. Despite the environmental accolades showered on the program, its environmental effects will be negligible.

How much will we save? Not much.


United States Energy Information Administration 's projections put CO2 emissions from gasoline powered vehicles at more than 16,000 million metric tons for 2010 -- 2019. The Obama administration recently proposed tighter fuel economy standards that, when implemented, should reduce emissions by 220 million metric tons, about a 1.3% drop.

Initial data from the Department of Transportation indicate that vehicles purchased under cash for clunkers are 69% more fuel-efficient than the vehicles they have replaced. So, according to our calculations, at best, the program will save about 7 million metric tons of CO2, or 0.04% -- less than two days worth -- of total emissions during that decade. By 2015, most of the clunkers scrapped under the program would have been retired anyway, and the environmental impact of removing them will vanish.

But it does not end there because, unlike clunkers, new cars are fun to drive.


Supporters of the Cash for Clunkers points to the fuel savings that the program is supposed to achieve. Unfortunately, programs that merely substitute older vehicles for newer, higher miles per gallon vehicles do not account for a critical piece of the vehicle emissions puzzle. We are cars are driven more than older cars. On average people drive their new cars and trucks about 25% more than they do with their 10-year-old vehicles. A new vehicles are driven as much as 3 to 5 times farther than genuine clunkers. Thus, new vehicles may have significantly better MPG ratings in the vehicles they replace, but since they are driven more CO2 savings will be further offset by increased use.

And the cars we're buying under the program do not have great mileage.


First the good news. The cars being turned in are bona fide clunkers. They get worse gas mileage than the average 13-year-old car.

But the bad news is that the average miles per gallon of the vehicles being fought under Cash for Clunkers barely beats the average of all vehicles currently sold in the United States. So the main impact of the program is to remove clunkers that were being driven much anyway, while drivers acquire vehicles that they will drive a lot and that are only slightly more fuel-efficient than the average new car. Is that worth $4500?

If the program returns such marginal savings, why do it? One reason is that it appears to be accelerating the sale of cars, although Edmunds, which tracks car-buying trends, reports that many Cash for clunkers buyers just delayed their purchases in anticipation of this bonanza. A better program would have pinned the rewards to a calculation of fuel savings based on the remaining life of the clunker in the miles per gallon of the clunker and the new car the math is simple, but Congress is run by lawyers!

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SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, WRITET, Oak Ridge Transportation Energy Data Book, National Household Transportation Survey, U.S. Dept. of Transportation | GRAPHIC: Lee Schipper, Joel Mehler, Brian Gould, Chris Ganson

SOURCE of original article: Washington Post, undated. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/08/08/GR2009080802658.html

AUTHORS: Lee Schipper, Global Metropolitan Studies, University of California Berkeley, and the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, Stanford University. Joel Mehler, Stanford University. Brian Gould, GMS. Chris Ganson, WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE

Dr. Schipper manages to be simultaneously Senior Scientist with the Global Metropolitan Studies of the University of California Berkeley, and of Precourt Energy Efficiency Center of Stanford University. He has long been a voice calling for more balanced approaches in the world energy policy sector. He has impeccable new mobility qualifications since he has long commuted to work daily by bicycle. Lee leads a jazz quintet which plays on demand and is still remembered for their first international hit recording of “The Phunky Physicist” in Sweden in 1973.


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And now, a glance at Europe's 'cash-for-clunkers' programs

By The Associated Press (AP) – 8 Aug. 2009

The popular "cash-for-clunkers" program that has encouraged consumers in Europe and the U.S. to trade in their old cars for newer and more efficient models was born in December 2008 when French President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled a Euro 26 billion ($37.36 billion) stimulus plan to help the country ward off a recession.

To date, 11 countries in Europe offer similar plans.

* Germany offers Euro 2,500 to buyers of new or almost new cars who own cars that are nine years or older.

* France offers Euro 1,000 to scrap an older car that's at least 10 years old.

* Italy offers Euro 1,500 for a car and Euro 2,500 for a light commercial vehicle for buyers who agree to scrap a car that is at least 10 years old.

* Spain offers Euro 2,000 on a purchase price of up to Euro 30,000; old car must be at least 10 years old.

* Portugal offers Euro 1,250 for scrapping a car that is 8 to 12 years old, or Euro 1,500 for a car that is older than 12 years.

* The Netherlands pays between Euro 750 to Euro 1,750 to scrap a car that is 9, 13 or 19-years-old.

* Austria offers Euro 1,500; car must be at least 12 years old.

* Romania offers Euro 900 to scrap a car that is at least 10 years old but limited the program to just 60,000 units.

* Slovakia offers Euro 1,100 toward a purchase price of up to Euro 18,800.

* Serbia offers Euro 1,000 on any new locally built Fiat Punto if a buyer trades in a 9-year-old car.

Source: Various governments, IHS Global Insight. - http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jOxyXvhSiYz--vOseImAnJ5Nl4xwD99U99I81

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.


Great ideas travel fast. The editor.

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From the editor: Safe Streets? Who cares?

It is a truly dreadful thing for anyone, me for instance, to lay on you anything as hackneyed as: a picture is worth a thousand words. But let me run the risk and show you a couple of pictures and leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. The topic is the first round of reactions to our start-up 2012 collaborative project aiming at clarifying the concept of Safe Streets from a strategic planning and policy perspective.

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Mr. Meter on America’s "Cash for Clunkers"

(While Lee Schipper is recovering, here is another example of his always-on prescience in the poorly lit streets of this gasping planet.) If matters of climate, sustainable transportation and careful use of scarce resources are close to your heart, and you happen to be European, you may have some reserves about your country's ecologically billed, and energetically buttressed "Cash for Clunkers" (in more polite Euro language of course) program. Let a couple of Americans energy policy experts help you feel a bit less embarrassed. You are not alone.

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The Not-Sustainable Transport Library (A final resting place for those really bad "green" ideas)

We have just today created a new forum under the New Mobility Agenda. It is called The Not Sustainable Transport Library, and the idea is to create a nice warm place in which we can stack articles and sources on what we think are very poor transportation/environment proposals - often technology rich and rarely cheap - that present themselves as "the next great green idea" for our cities and the planet. Watch out for the doctor!

If you can't figure out what a bad idea is, how can you ever expect to find a good. one? Or as Henry Ford so famously said so long ago in "My Years in Industry" (1928), "of all the kinds of work I know thinking is certainly the hardest. And I guess that's why most people do so little of it." Amen.

The Not-Sustainable Transport Library:

From the introductory text of the library site:

In this shared space we shall attempt to provide a comfortable resting place for a certain number of what we hope will serve as telling examples of things not to be fooled by: information on and leads to transport related projects, proposals and technologies that are very often presented (hyped may be a better word) by those who stand to gain from their implementations as advancing the sustainability agenda -- but which in our view are at best extremely low in the priories for public sector support in any form, and certainly not candidates for finance with hard-earned taxpayer money.

There can be no doubt that there is a very definite set of values and priorities behind these selections. (Some may call them prejudices). They are, I might add, strong and they are, moreover, consistent. The basics behind these selections you will finally amply spelled out here in the pages of World Streets and behind that over at the New Mobility Agenda. For a quick resume a visit to our four page/four minute summary should help fill out the basic background on all this.

Are these really such awful ideas? That's not our point. To the contrary, almost all of them are interesting in many respects, a fair number of them are highly ingenious, and just about all of them have been the object of hard work, brains and dreams. Please do check them out if you have the time, and there may be circumstances in which they could work very well indeed. It is just that we do not see them as leading the way to more sustainable transport and a less hyper-charged planet given our extreme timetable. For that quite another approach is called for.

If you wish to have a look at the full collection, the library address is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheNotSustainableTransportLibrary. It is open 24/7 and very quiet.

We are interested to have your news on candidate projects and proposals that you think shoudl be laid to rest in this calm place. For this, an email to TheNotSustainableTransportLibrary@yahoogroups.com should do it quite nicely. And to comment on any of these projects, you can always post your message to that same address.

Otherwise, to subscribe:
TheNotSustainableTransportLibrary-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

And to unsubscribe: TheNotSustainableTransportLibrary-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Finally when you check into World Streets you will see that we have a left menu item entitled "Latest World Streets News Leads", and in addition to the ten serious sources, you will find our bad idea graveyard there, with a quick line on the latest to enter those fiery gates.

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World Streets needs to do better

John Ernst, a long time sustainable transport colleague and ITDP Vice Director, Southeast Asia, writes that he finds World Streets pretty good value thus far, but he regrets that most of our content thus far seems to be focusing on what is going on within the advanced edge of the OECD region.

Letter from the editor

What can I say in response but yes indeed -- so what if we now put our heads together to bring in content from other parts of the world . . . after all, that’s where most of the people are and where the future is going to play out in the mega-numbers.

So let me share this with you as a challenge. And what do we need from all these places? Well, news on trials and innovations to support more sustainable transport where they are actually up and working, honest reporting on everything, and even from time to time when it is exemplary, information for our excellent and consistently troubling Bad News Department.

But we are at least getting read in other parts of the world. Take a look at the map showing the origin of people coming in to Streets this morning , and we note visitors in the last days from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dubai, India, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Rumania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey. That has to mean something.


And in this spirit if you can help us bring in readers from these other places, it is surely a step in the right direction. Readers can become sources and writers rather quickly we have seen.

One idea that comes to mind immediately is to see if we can get your support for doing some Leadership Profiles – see http://tinyurl.com/ws-profiles for latest background on that -- on outstanding organizations and programs in these parts of the world. Again, it is true that we tend to now most about what is going on in the OECD region, but profiles telling us what lading programs and groups are trying to do in China, India, Indonesia and all the rest will be very important and of high interest to us all.

And am I hearing someone saying Africa and the Middle East too? Yes, please.

Finally we are not exactly sitting on our hands and here is something that is still cooking, but may provide us with a key for John Ernst's ’s good challenge for the future. We are working with our Italian friend and Eyes on the Street Sentinel in Bergamo in the north of Italy, Enrico Bonfatti, to develop an Italian language site – Nuova Mobilità -- which takes World Streets as part of its content but then builds on it in several interesting and powerful ways to make it into a good and useful read to advance the sustainable transport agenda in Italy. You can check it out at http://nuovamobilita.blogspot.com, but please understand it is still work in progress and not yet ready for show time. But it is, as you will see, a strong start.

There are two main streams of content for a partner journal like this. The first is selected World Streets articles which Enrico Bonfatti and eventually others are adapting not only in terms of putting them into Italian, but also interpreting and adapting them so as to have meaning in the Italian context. The second stream is Italian content per se. (And of course we at Streets profit because some of this becomes material for selective publication here.)

Perhaps this can serve as an example for yet other countries and language groups. It is too early to say if we can get the right model for this, but it is to let you know that we are working on it and trying to develop it as a template for relatively easy adaptation. If you wish to talk about this in the case of your country or language group, it would be great to hear from you.

So kindly get in touch with your ideas and suggestions. You can do this either publically here, or if you think it better to me directly. Thanks for thinking about it. And of yes, keep your eyes on the street.

Eric Britton

PS. As part of this necessary outreach we have decided that the Streets theme for the month of August will be Sustainable Transport in Africa: Advancing the Agenda. About time, eh?

World Streets - Building a new majority.

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Op-Ed, Cornie Huizenga: The transport sector as leader in the sustainability debate?

There are a lot of reasons which need to be investigated if we are to have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the sustainable transportation wars. The first step in this necessary process is to accept that by any reasonable measure, we are losing the war and losing it badly -- in such a way that each day our sector in cities around the world is one that is in a state of increasing disruption and destruction, aggressing our most fundamental human and social values. It is that bad, and anyone who refuses to accept this is very definitely part of the problem. But then, once we have accepted the bad news, it is time to stop the weeping and figure out how can start to reverse this mounting tide of poor policies, unwise investments, and other abject indifference to all of those who are left worse off in the process. Let me stand aside here and give the word to Cornie Huizenga who has some thoughtful positive suggestions s to where we might go from here.

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