Towards Car Free Cities. Guadalajara, Mexico, 5-9 Sept. 2011

The time to move towards carfree cities has come. We must come from the cities that we don´t know to the ones we belong to. Step by step moving onto the right way. To make a call up, to share this view and to open our own mind in order to have a better future for all of us, to find better ways to transport ourselves in a conscious way. It´s time to move on.

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World Streets from Aug. 20 to Sept. 20: Gone fishin'

While World Streets is a collaborative journal fed by a steady flow of contributions of hundreds of contributors from countries around the world, plunging the depths and enormous variations of the challenges of sustainable transportation and sustainable cities, our entire massive editorial staff consists of a single person, also known as Eric Britton, your servant, whose day job it is to spot, incite, cajole and eventually coordinate the articles, photographs, illustrations, letters, commentaries and other media which regularly populate these pages.

But in the late summer month directly ahead, I will be unable to ensure this function since I have been invited to participate and take a significant role in no less than three major international projects which are online for that period and which are simply too good to miss. 

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Homage to Lee Schipper: Physicist and Iconoclast

From the New York Times. Leon J. Schipper, a physicist whose passion for data led him to question the value of popular energy policies, like government subsidies for ethanol and for electric cars and the “cash for clunkers” program, died Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 64.

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Homage to Lee Schipper: We were all his students

From Steve Winkelman:
Our dear friend and valuable colleague, Lee Schipper, transportation research guru par excellence, died on August 16th after a fast and fierce battle with cancer. We’ve lost a giant.

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In homage to Lee Schipper

Our long-time colleague and very dear friend Lee Shipper left us on Tuesday evening, warmly surrounded by family and loving friends. Since he meant so much to so many of us who have been involved in the uphill struggle for sustainability in all its forms and corners of our lives, I thought it would be appropriate to open up these pages over the next days, and possibly more than that, to a selection of pieces in which the author reflects on the kind of very special person that Lee was.

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World Vehicle Population Tops 1 Billion

The number of vehicles in operation worldwide surpassed the 1 billion-unit mark in 2010 for the first time ever. According to Ward’s research, which looked at government-reported registrations and historical vehicle-population trends, global registrations jumped from 980 million units in 2009 to 1.015 billion in 2010.  - By John Sousanis. WardsAuto.com, Aug 15, 2011 9:00 AM

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Weekend break: Photos of Mumbai's infrastructure changing, since 1864

Click to access (And you may wish to spend a bit of time with the comments)

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IV. The Female Quotient: Next steps on World Streets - Leadership Profiles

After the first article in this series appeared in these pages on July 27th, more than fifty people from a dozen countries responded with suggestions and nominations for profiles of outstanding women who through their work, character and originality are, quite literally, shaping and re-shaping the transportation agenda. Based on that strong response, their quality and the evident interest in the topic, we have decided to see if we can work with those making these nominations to provide a series of leadership profiles to improve the international visibility concerning the contributions that women are making in the field at all the key levels involved.

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Weekend break with Lee Schipper on Vibes

Lee (The Phunky Physicist) Schipper  on Vibraphone at Better Air Quality 2008 workshop in Bangkok, Thailand --  playing at Imperial Queen's Park Hotel on Nov, 11th 2008.

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Car Free Day in Vilnius. Finally a mayor who really cares.

[caption id="attachment_7021" align="alignright" width="168" caption="Have a nice day"][/caption]

Here is a rough chronology showing how information gets around in the world-wide sustainable transport network in 2011. Last Monday, 1 August, someone named Meras Zuokas (whom we do not know but whom we definitely like and who by all indications lives in Lithuania), uploaded a 104 second video onto YouTube with commentary in Lithuanian, showing a dynamic mayor dealing directly with the classic sustainable transport problem of illegally parked cars encumbering circulation in designated bike lanes in the capital city of Vilnius. That was the first stop on a lightning journey around the world that in a few days brings us here.

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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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Car Crazy: Lee Schipper on the Perils of Asia’s Hyper-Motorization

Our old friend and long time colleague Lee Schipper is sitting in a hospital bed in Berkeley California today, and since your editor is stuck in Paris and can't visit him, we thought that while he gets his strength back we would  reach into our and others archives and publish a series of pieces to celebrate his deep knowledge of all that World Streets is about, his  excellent judgement and his world level communications skills. (And if you have something by Lee that you would like to share with our readers as we wait for him to swing back into action, please send it on.)

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Tragedy of the Commons: The car as enclosure

Chris Bradshaw, Canadian planner and new mobility innovator, takes us on a quick peek into cars as "enclosures" of what should more rightly be the common domain in our cities. When we look at it this way, the concept of a "right to park" starts to look quite different. We are once again back to the concept of "worst practices" on the one hand, and on the other, our the understanding of space as public, private . . . or social. All of a sudden we have a new and quite different base for discussion and policy.

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