Our Right to Walk is Non-negotiable (India)

Anumita Roychowdhury, associate director of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, in a wide-ranging conversation with Faizal Khan reporting for the excellent Walkability Asia ( Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities),  spells out clearly the inevitability of a non-motorised transport code in India through shocking figures and revealing facts. "We need zero tolerance policy for accidents. This menu of action needs support. Our right to walk is not negotiable."  And on this Roychowdhury is entirely right. On this score we must be entirely intransigent and as part of this to keep pounding away on this important point of citizen activism on every available occasion, until we get the concept of zero tolerance written into the law and respected on the streets. All our streets!

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Op-Ed: Where Does SLoCaT Stand in Realizing Sustainable Transport?

Three years ago the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT) was established to address the relative absence of sustainable transport in the global discussions on sustainable development and climate change. Rapid motorization in the developing world and its negative impacts motivated the organizations that came together in SLoCaT. There was agreement that SLoCaT should initially have a mandate for three years only and that by the end of 2012 a decision would be made whether to call it a day or to go on, possibly, with a revised mission. Those three years have gone by. So where is SLoCaT now and what is next; declare victory and move on, admit defeat and move on, or stay in the fight?

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Op-Ed: Toward More Prosperous Cities

- Op-Ed Contributor: Wendell Cox, published 14 Dec. 2012. Comments invited

I appreciate Eric Britton's gracious invitation to contribute my views on cities and urban transport to World Streets. Obviously, many readers will disagree with all or part the article. Nonetheless, the state of knowledge is never complete and progress continues to depend on open minds and civil discussion of perspectives among people of good will. There is extensive use of "hyperlinks," which provide direction to greater detail for any interested. The article begins with the public policy context, then follows with urban policy, urban transport and sustainability.

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Letter from Bangalore: The Derelict Mile

Sujaya Rathi  reports from Bangalore:
Private vehicles in India have seen an unprecedented growth in past two decades and there is no sign of slowing down.  Many initiatives to curb the trend have not been successful.  This article highlights an important aspect that attribute to the above unsustainable phenomenon, which has been ignored: "The Derelict Mile".

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Op-Ed: The Story of UK Roads/Streets.

Op-Ed: The Story of UK Roads/Streets

• Poorly designed roundabouts - enabling even HGV's to travel around them at speed, the police thinking a cyclist could make a driver aware of "him" with a bell or a whistle...


• Police on bicycles without blue lights or sirens, chasing others through red lights... then stopping others for doing the same, who proceeded with caution,


• Advanced stop lines seem to provide little benefit, and may have been partly to blame for the death of Cynthia McVitty's daughter.


• Humans get territorial, and thus cycle lanes become hazards for cyclists when too narrow, and for pedestrians when they step onto them,


• Too many cyclists in the UK cycle at speeds inappropriate to the situation.

- Ian Perry. Cardiff, Wales, UK ianenvironmental@googlemail.com

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Op-Ed: Awful Injustice in Parking

Op-Ed: Awful Injustice in Parking

Misguided parking policy is harmful and unjust.

No surprise there, you may say. There is no shortage of complaints about parking prices ("unfair!") and about how difficult it is to find parking. We hear the same thing all over the world, whether in Sydney, San Francisco, Singapore, Moscow, Delhi , Jakarta, Beijing, Sao Paolo, Lagos or Nairobi.

Sorry to be unsympathetic. But complaints like those are a problem. They are fuel for the never-ending push for more parking and cheaper parking.

So what?

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Op-Ed: Priority for Public Transport in Tallinn

Priority for Public Transport in Tallinn (Probably the Best)

- Eric Britton, 06. september 2012 01:00

Op-Ed from today's Estonian Times: http://goo.gl/7gkFJ (in Estonian)

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Report on 2011 Urban Mobility India Conference

Report for India Streets by Vidyadhar Date, Mumbai

The fourth annual Urban Mobility India conference organised in Delhi from December 3 to 6 by the ministry of urban development was no doubt a useful exercise. It did well to give more focus on bicycles and public transport than the previous conference. But the venue itself was highly inaccessible, difficult to reach even by a private car, leave alone public transport.

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Op-Ed: A divine solution for Car Free Days?

One of the sayings we use most often at World Streets is one that goes "you can never tell where the next good idea is going to come from". Here is an example.

As some of our readers certainly know, we have something of an affinity with the concept of Car Free Days -- which we nonetheless attempt to qualify with ample doses of realism and critical thinking (often sadly lacking). So as luck would have it we end up being something of a worldwide turnstile for news and views about how this or that concept of taking a few cars off the streets of the city and thinking about it for a day is treated in different places. Sometimes this can bring surprises.

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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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Help Wanted Department: Donald Appleyard is (almost) not on Wikipedia

To: John Whitelegg, Editor, WTPP


Dear John,  Your editorial and latest edition of World Transport  got me to thinking once again about the great work of Donald Appleyard -- to the extent in which I have decided to make his 1981 publication of Livable Streets into a significant milestone in the process of sustainable development accomplishment and awareness in the context of the course which I am currently developing at – http://sustain.ecoplan.org

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World Transport Policy & Practice – Vol. 17, No. 1

The Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice is the long-standing idea and print partner of World Streets and the New Mobility Agenda since 1995. The Spring edition appears today with articles by Ian Ker, Joshua Odeleye and Eric Britton. In the article that follows you will find the lead editorial by founding editor John Whitelegg. (For a more complete introduction to World Transport click here.)

- - - > To obtain your copy of WTPP 17/1 click here.

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Ten reasons why I really hate cars (and drivers) in cities

Well the calm of this sunny April day did not last long.  Bear hours after publication of what we thought was going to be perfectly harmless op-ed criticizing bicycles and bike readers in cities, comments, scathing and otherwise,  came cascading into the editorial offices of World Streets and our open Facebook Group page at http://www.facebook.com/worldstreets.  And within hours the following slipped in over the transom from cyclist Ezra Goldman over at “On our own two wheels”.  Let's hear what he has to say.

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Ten reasons why I really hate bicycles (and cyclists) in cities.

The following in this morning from an unidentified but  apparently pretty  disgruntled motorist who asked that we make his grievances widely known in the pages of World Streets.  So in the spirit of equal time and with no more ado, World Streets turns over the stage to him. Let's listen to what he has to say:

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Budget of 2011 in India: What could they be thinking?

While one face of the government sulks and spoils, the other dares to act. The budget making exercise this year in India is an evidence of this. There is progressive grassroots decision to discourage polluting diesel cars and encourage public transport and bicycles in India’s capital city of Delhi, which is in sharp contrast to the reactionary non-visionary action at the national level. Anumita Roychowdhury reports from Delhi.

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Picking a few bones with our old World Bank friends

We try very hard on World Streets to stay firmly on topic. But given the swirling many-sided kaleidoscopic complexity of our concerns, we are obliged from time to time to step outside of the usual lines. For this reason, you will find here an article challenging the eventual stewardship role of the World Bank in a new global Green Climate Fund (GCF) initiative which is being discussed this week in Bangkok by climate change negotiators from 190 countries.

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City as a time capsule: Urban highway construction mania still booming in 2011

Transport planning and policy in Lahore Pakistan today, as reported by public policy consultant Hassaan Ghazali, looks like something that was dragged out of a moss-covered time capsule on a hot day: a tawdry reminder of the kind of old mobility thinking, interest-wrangling and mindless investments of hard-earned taxpayer money that challenged and in many cases helped destroy the urban fabric of cities across North America and in many other parts of the world half a century ago.

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Stop press! Carsharing is apparently not dead after all.*

We always enjoy a good knock-up on World Streets. Keeps us thinking. After yesterday's piece in which Nicolas le Douarec undertook to stretch our minds and challenge us to consider carsharing from some other perspectives, including apparently in a coffin, we hear today from an old friend Michael Glotz-Richter from Bremen who has been orchestrating carsharing in his city and trans-European collaboration in the field for the last decade, running an EU program which currently goes by the somewhat mystifying acronym of momo (see below). Here is what Michael has to say about yesterday's reported corpse.

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Carsharing is dead, long live . . . car rental?

We have been reading and hearing quite a bit in the French media, and in particular in the context of the city of Paris's ambitious planned Autolib project, that "carsharing is dead in France". Which came as something of a surprise given that our own read of the evidence does not at all square with this position. So we asked Nicolas le Douarec, who has something of a record in bringing carsharing to Paris, what he thought about that death warrant. His heady response follows.

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"Time to count the spoons": Alan Atkinson on sustainabilty back-peddling

Dr. Samuel Johnson reminded us some time back that "When a man proclaims his honor loudly at the table, it's time to count the spoons". Which is what our guest editorials Alan Atkisson is going for us today as he comments on loudly proclaimed sustainability initiatives from Europe and America. Oops. Something appears to be missing here.

Sustainability under assault

Reading the news has not been easy for champions of sustainability in recent weeks, at least in the Western World. That means the news has not been kind to the interests of future generations, to new economic thinking, to accelerated innovation, to long-term prosperity, or to life on Earth, for that matter. It almost feels as though sustainability itself is under assault, at least from some national governments -- just when its value in economic terms has been solidly established, and the need for it in environmental and social terms has risen dramatically.

Let's review the situation.

First, the new UK government axed the Sustainable Development Commission (www.sd-comission.org.uk). This Commission, led by Jonathan Porritt, has been an extraordinary source of innovative thinking and clear-sighted critique for the past decade. Its impact on the UK has been very important ... but its impact has also been global. And as a "cost-cutting" measure, it's wrong-headed.

The Commission was costing the UK government roughly 3 million pounds per year, but by following (some of) its advice on energy conservation and the like, the UK government was already saving many times that amount -- and could have saved a lot more.

Outside the UK, the Commission's reports helped to advance and even to reframe the debate on sustainability -- especially Commissioner Tim Jackson's landmark report, "Prosperity without Growth" (now a book, published by Earthscan. Hint: Download the original report free while the Commission's website is still working. Click here >> )

Across the pond in the United States of America, energy and climate change legislation died in the Senate -- despite the fact that a supposedly pro-climate-action majority of 60 Democrats sits there. Barring a political miracle, the Senate may have wasted the best historical opportunity to get something serious into US law, and it has at least wasted precious time.

Crossing the Atlantic again, France has earned positive headlines for its recent legislative commitment to sustainability, both its new "Grenelle" package of laws, and its recently released national strategy on "développement durable" (interestingly, many languages use a word meaning "durable" or "enduring" in place of "sustainable").

But at the same time, my colleagues in France tell me that actual money for sustainability programs has been drastically cut; and according to the French papers, the new national strategy lacks "any detail ... on how the necessary investments for the realization of its objectives are to be financed." (Les Echos, 27 July 2010)

Meanwhile, the news on the state of the planet has not been heart-warming, either. A recent global report on biodiversity carries the scary title "Dead Planet, Living Planet" -- a glass-half-empty message if ever there was one. Ironically, we are losing to fight to retain biodiversity, even as we get better at figuring out how much life on Earth is actually worth to us in cold, hard cash -- somewhere between 21 and 72 trillion dollars per year, according to the United Nations Environment Program's new report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. That's roughly equivalent to the entire annual Gross World Product ($58 trillion in 2008).

Meanwhile (again), a new NOAA report is out on climate change, and US and UK scientists are using words like "undeniable" and "glaringly obvious." Even Russia's President Medvedev is talking like a climate activist these days, as his country swelters in record-breaking heatwaves.

So ... what's a sustainability optimist to do, in the face of such pessimistic news?

Veteran planet-watcher Lester Brown, lecturing in Stockholm, was asked how he maintained optimism in the face of the gathering gloominess. "I get that question a lot, and I have a one-word answer," he joked. "Bourbon."

Lester's real answer, of course (both at that lecture, and as evidenced by his own years of extraordinary work), is not alcohol -- it's action.

And not just any action: strategic action, designed to create the most powerful impacts possible, in the shortest amount of time.

Because that's what we're all working for, and that's what the world needs.

Now more than ever.

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About the author:

Alan AtKisson began professional work on sustainability in 1988, serving as executive editor of the pioneering journal In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture. In 1990, he and other colleagues co-founded the Sustainable Seattle initiative, later recognized by the United Nations as a model project in urban sustainability and indicator development. Also in 1990, Alan began to introduce the concept of "sustainability change agents" through workhops and lectures, and to develop the tools and methods that are now called the ISIS Accelerator and used world wide. In 1992, Alan began consulting on sustainability and founded the small business that has grown into the AtKisson Group. - www.atkisson.com

A few closing words from Alan on their current work in this area:

At the moment, my publisher Earthscan and I are planning the re-launch of two of my books in new versions. Both of them are about what it takes to be optimistic and to continue making positive, strategic, accelerated change for sustainability -- no matter what the odds.

So be on the lookout this November for the new Believing Cassandra: How to be an Optimist in a Pessimist's World(you can already pre-order the fully updated new edition). Also, my second book, The ISIS Agreement, will appear in paperback then with a new introduction, cover ... and even a new title. I'll keep the (very optimistic) new title for the ISIS book secret for now ... but the new subtitle should give you a taste of it: "How to Make Positive Change in Difficult Times."

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