Dear Reader. May we rent your brain?

World Streets iwill on 1 May close down regular publication until we have managed to resolve our challenging financial situation. If you share our deeply felt goals concerning the up-hill push to sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, read on and consider how you could lend a hand. We need both near term and more solid longer term backing in order to be able to continue to make our contribution. And for this, your ideas and contacts can be of real help. If you like what we are doing with World Streets, let me ask you to read on.

World Streets is closing down the editorial department as we reach out to secure funding support

We have no money gentlemen, so we shall have to think. *

I am often told that World Streets and our ambitious New Mobility Agenda family of initiatives give the impression of being an ambitious, trouble free, fully funded operation. Would that it were so. Our bare bones operating budget is on the order of $8,000/month — way beyond what I am able to continue to fund out of pocket. So we need your help if we are to keep going. Hence this note:

As founder and editor, I have three jobs. The first is to organize the production side of the journal and to find and work with authors and collaborators around the world to produce challenging thinkpieces and articles which hew to the rigorous strategic lines we have set out to guide all our work (See Strategy ). The second is to contribute as editorialist and author. And the third is that of securing the funding needed to keep this boat afloat. That is proving more problematic.

So to ensure this last and for reasons of force majeur, I am obliged to close down the editorial side of this enterprise for the coming week-plus, and concentrate on fund-raising.  And once we have worked our way through the worst and most pressing of our obligations, we can start to free the time needed to get publciation back into full steam.

And here is maybe where you can help. Since you know a/ what we are trying to accomplish is important and b/ that we need support to keep our operations going, I can make this fast:

1. Support World Streets. You accomplish this by digging into your pocket to make a contribution. We have an important job to do, we have shown day after day over the last two years that we can deliver the goods, and if we don't do it I very much doubt that anyone else will. So if you have been consulting World Streets and are in agreement with our unique approach, and can afford it, please click here for details on how to make a donation. Your contribution, large or small, is an important vote of support for what we are trying to accomplish.

2. Project level collaboration: If we are to be an active force in the move to more sustainable cities, we have to do more than act as a sit-behind-the-desk publisher. Indeed the nature of the challenge requires that we get into the field and work closely with people and organizations locally who share our concerns and values to organize: conferences, courses, public hearings, workshops, brainstorming sessions, master classes, debates, media appearances, and public events in support of the sustainable transport agenda.

We actually do this pretty well but we need people like you to help us make the necessary local or national contacts to do this. Over the last year alone we have been involved in collaborative projects in place with colleagues in cities, agencies and programs in Austria, Britain, China, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and Taiwan.

3. Implementation partners and sponsors: Our primary working partners for moving the sustainable transport agenda from theory to practice are cities, public agencies, operators, funded NGOs and associations. At the local, national, regional or international level these are the key institutions with broad responsibilities to guide policy and investments in the field. Can you help us make contact with well-placed people and organizations that you have worked with or know? Once the first contacts have been made at the right level, useful collaborative projects can develop quickly and well, and with very modest budgets

4. Foundations: I sincerely believe that World Streets is good enough, unique enough, to qualify for the support of institutions, agencies, foundations, and also well-to-do individuals who share our sense of mission. These kinds of contacts are not my strong suit, so your help here is absolutely critical.

In conclusion:
So for the coming weeks until we have made our breakthroughs, the only articles that will appear here will be limited to notices and information which support the funding search. This is not to say that we are not continuing to receive and work on reports and articles from our collaborators that will in time appear in these pages. But for now there is a real shortage of time and means which we now need to deal with as our first priority. You understand of course.

Do you think you might be ready to help? I very much hope so.

Eric Britton



PS. And what can you do or access from our work and resources while the publishing end of W/S is down. Quite a bit actually. Here are some clues:

Annex A: A few references and handy resources

- The 4 page Mission statement
- W/S as a continuing research resource
- The Weekly Editions
- Reader views on W/S contributions since March 2009
- Who read W/S this morning
- Nova Mobilità (Italian sister publication)
- India Streets (sister publication)
- Network Dispatches

Annex B: See and interact with World Streets from different angles on . . .

• Facebook – World Streets Facebook Group


• Twitter – Twitter/World Streets


• Scribd – http://.scribd.com/fekbritton


• LinkedIn – LinkedIn World Streets Group


• Picasa – The lively faces of the world’s streets


• YouTube – World Streets on YouTube

Annex C: Facebook Focus Groups (You will need to be logged in to access)

1. Africa Streets – Click here


2. Gatnet: Gender & transport – Click here


3. Global South – Click here


4. India Streets – Click here


5. Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice – Click here


6. New Mobility Café – Click here


7. New Mobility Kids Network – Click here


8. Nova Mobilidade – Click here


9. Nuova Mobilità – Click here


10. World Carshare Consortium – Click here


11. World City Bike Forum – Click here


12. World Rideshare – Click here


13. World Rural Transport – Click here


14. World Streets Sentinels – Click here


15. World Telemobility – Click here


16. World xTransit – Click here

- - > Click here to support World Streets.

* The words of - Nobel Prize winner Professor Ernest Rutherford, on taking over the quite broke Cavendish Laboratory in 1919, in the wake of the First World War.

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