1-minute movies

If you click today to the home page of the 2010 Kaohsiung Conference of the World Share/Transport Forum at www.kaohsiung.sharetransport.org, you will see that the organizers have just this morning added the first of an intended new cycle of “1-minute movies” by way of livening up the conference preparations, and as a quick introduction to the concepts of sharing in transport as a sustainability strategy. We have long been proponents of the imaginative use of media of all sorts to get the messages of sustainable development and social justice out to a world that is for the most part more puzzled than antagonistic.
It is our dead-serious intention to make use of all the tools and tricks we can lay our hands on to get the basic message of the World Share/Transport Forum program and associated events and conferences across: namely, that we really should be trying to understand better what happens if people start to think more in terms of not things, physical objects, but of services, i.e., whatever it is that they really need.

Our goal in selecting these little films is not to try to convert people in a single minute or two to our priorities and our way of thinking, but rather to familiarize them just a bit in a soft way about the fact that there are, in fact, other ways of seeing and doing things when it comes to getting around in cities. We want to open a few doors, but no pushing.

We intend in this section to provide a certain number of very short videos that in our view can help get these points across. And since many in our audience at Kaohsiung are not familiar with English as their main working language, we shall try to limit ourselves to videos which are image- and not word-heavy. Today you have our first three candidates. Your comments are most welcome. Perhaps you will have some candidates to support the program. If so, you know where to find us.

- - - > Click here to go to the 1-minute movies. (See top menu, right)

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No Accident! Traffic and Pedestrians in the Modern City

As most of our regular readers are well aware, World Streets is no friend of speed in cities. To the contrary, it is our firm position that a considerable number of the basic objectives associated with sustainable mobility and sustainable cities can be achieved if we do no more than to reduce top speeds in and around our cities in a strategic and carefully thought-out way. The great technological virtuosity of traffic engineers and technical planners permit us to do this, while at the same time retaining a well working transportation system, a healthier city, and a viable local economy. Listen to what John Rennie Short and Luis Mauricio Pinet-Peralta have to tell us on the subject.

No Accident: Traffic and Pedestrians in the Modern City

Authors: John Rennie Short and Luis Mauricio Pinet-Peralta. Department of Public Policy, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

Abstract
This paper considers the rise of traffic accidents in the creation of the modern city. The notion of accidents is deconstructed. There is a brief review of current literature on mobilities and then evidence is presented of the shifting configuration of vehicle-pedestrian accidents. The epidemic of traffic accidents of cities in developing world is noted and explained. The incidence of pedestrian traffic accidents is shown to reflect socio-economic characteristics such as age, class and status. A review of the literature provides evidence of the ways to ameliorate pedestrian injuries. Walksheds are suggested as a focus of concern. The creation of a more pedestrian-friendly city is proposed.

The Modern City

At the heart of modernity is the connection between speed, the machine and the city. In his 1909 manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) glorified the man at the wheel and the beauty of speed. He associated speed with courage in action and slowness with stagnant prudence. His glorification of the speeding automobile in the city prefigures its subsequent centrality to urban development.

Cities were reimagined and then reengineered to promote high speed. Virilo (1986; 1995; 2005) tells a story of the destruction of the sociability of the city by the logic of acceleration. In a more nuanced interpretation, Latham and McCormack (2008) explore the ways in which the speed and the 'countervailing eddies of slowness' define the experience of the city. However, in terms of urban traffic and the marginalization and displacement of the self-propelled human body, Virilio's image of the city as a site of acceleration seems closer to the mark. In this paper, we will explore one of the little discussed consequences of this transformation, the risk of bodily accidents in what are described as 'traffic accidents'.

The modern city is designed largely around the use of motor vehicles despite the inherent risks in machine-body coexistence, part of the brisk pace of city life. Indeed, in the immediate prehistory of automotive ascendancy, the Futurists downplayed any risks and celebrated machine-body meshing as a means to a high-speed, dynamic superhumanity.

Such eventual transformation was made possible, according to the Futurism's founding myth, when poet Filippo Marinetti emerged from a ditch after crashing his beloved Fiat, spewing mud and apparently, the Manifesto of Futurism, which begins 'We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness' and famously continues 'We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace' (Flint, 1972, p. 41).

By the early 1930s, Le Corbusier further enshrined swift automobility, proposing his 'autostrades' as concrete ribbons threading skyscrapers' canopies, elevated above mere city streets and devoid of pedestrians for optimum vehicular velocity. Speed and the fantasy of infinite mobility were at the heart of modernism and its physical embodiment in urban modernity. Norton (2008), for example, tells the story of American cities; at the beginning of the twentieth century, city streets had a variety of users, people as well as cars, and multiple users, a place for children playing, people walking, neighbors chatting.



From the 1900s to the early 1930s, a battle was fought between, on the one hand, the multiple users and interests decrying the onslaught of cars on streets and the growing dominance of auto traffic, the term 'death cars' was frequently used, and on the other hand, automotive interests which continually invoked freedom as a rallying cry. The automotive interests won. From our perspective today it seems a foregone conclusion but the 25-year period in the early twentieth century reminds us of the battle for alternative conceptions of the primary purpose of city streets.

This urban restructuring of the city streets as pathways for automobiles with pedestrians shunted to the sidewalks has a high human cost. High-speed machines mangle bodies and kill pedestrians and yet these costs are largely absent from urban studies and discussions of urban safety.

A recent book with the title The Safe City (Berg et al., 2006) makes for interesting reading, as much for what it does not include as for what it does include. While issues of terrorism and crime abound in the book, one issue receives scant attention despite the book's title, which is the risk of bodily injury and fatality from traffic accidents. Such neglect is not uncommon in the recent urban literature where terrorist campaigns and crime waves dominate safety issues, yet there is a huge silence on the issue of traffic safety and especially pedestrian injuries and fatalities.

There have been a number of commentators who have drawn attention to the issue of traffic and pedestrian safety (Hass-Klau, 1990), numerous empirical studies (e.g., Chapman et al., 1982; Graham & Glaister, 2003) as well as the continuing concern of such commentators as Mayer Hillman (Hillman, 1993; Karpf, 2002). However, the issue has failed to gain traction in the wider and broader urban studies literature. And yet the issue is of some importance.

Across the world almost over 10 million people are crippled or injured each year, and approximately 1.2 million people are killed every year due to road accidents, approximately 3,250 people every day, (Peden et al. 2004). That is the equivalent of a World Trade Center disaster on the world's roads each and every day. One writer even refers to a global epidemic of road deaths (Dahl, 2004). The total economic cost is estimated at 1 percent of the GNP of low-income countries and 2 percent in high-income countries (Jacobs et al., 2000).

No Accident

Even the quickest review of recent and classic urban texts reveals little consideration of this issue. Why the silence? Two reasons stand out. First, there is the notion of the accidental, of random events that are to be endured rather than explained.

The term 'accident' is revealing; it initially meant an event, anything that happens. Now the word commonly refers to an unforeseen event, a mishap. But the predictable covariance of road deaths with social phenomena belies this connotation of 'accident'. The young and the vulnerable and the poor and the marginal are more likely to be hit by a car than the rich and the powerful. While road deaths have declined among rich countries, they have increased among poor countries.

These statistics suggest an ordered causation rather than random occurrences. Road traffic accidents are not mishaps but events that are both explainable and preventable. The relative silence shrouding this serious issue is itself a political act. The incidence of pedestrian fatalities and injuries is skewed toward the more marginal and vulnerable members of society. Yet this consistent finding has failed to capture the attention of most critical theorists.

Most pedestrian fatalities occur in poor countries and have greater impact on the poor, the young and the old. Pedestrian injuries are just one strand in webs of multiple deprivations that bind people in disadvantaged positions. To see traffic fatalities and injuries through the lens of marginalization theory is to offer a very different perspective on them as accidents (see Cutler & Malone, 2005).

Second, there is the silence accorded to all events that have a constant background quality. The fact that road traffic accidents happen all the time makes them blend into the fabric of the taken for granted.

Too regular to generate much notice, they become mere white noise rather than events to be analyzed. Their very consistency and regularity allows them to fade into an unexamined, rarely discussed space. The urban spectaculars such as the collapse of the World Trade Center, overwhelms and ultimately silences the murderous regularity of road traffic fatalities and injuries.

Road traffic 'accidents' are taken for granted cost of contemporary urban living, a seeming inevitability that allows attention to be drawn to the more unusual, rare events; they are just too mundane, too anonymous, too ordinary to generate much interest. However, the rising concern with the everyday ordinary nature of the lived urban experience should prompt a reconsideration of road safety and risk.

The 'ordinary' quality assigned to road traffic accidents is, if you excuse the unintended pun, no accident: there is also a vast array of interests concerned with making them ordinary. These interests include the motor vehicle manufacturers, road builders, construction companies as well as a society that does not want to question the fatal costs of a culture and cities dominated by fast moving vehicles. The current usage of the term 'accidents' to refer to fatal and damaging machine-body interactions in the city is incorrect, misleading and deceptive in shifting the phenomenon from social outcome to random event.

Perrow (1999) introduced the notion of 'normal accidents' that may be unforeseeable yet are inevitable. Perrow based his initial work on the near meltdown of Three Mile Island. Drawing a wider perspective on high-risk technologies, he argues that accidents occur when systems become more complex and interconnected. These conditions are increasingly met in cities where traffic patterns are more complex and a variety of users share busier roads. The ubiquitous nature of motorized transport in many cities, in comparison to the obvious singularity of nuclear power station renders it, in the minds of many, as safe or relatively innocuous.

Yet a heavy piece of metal - the average weight of a US car in 2006 was 4142 lbs. (1878 kg) - traveling at even 30 miles per hour, operated by someone, perhaps listening to the radio, drinking coffee or using his cell phone, times the thousands of other drivers on a road in the average city constitutes a complex technological system with lots of room for human error. The result is a relatively high risk of being involved in a car crash. Our need for urban vehicular traffic has in part blinded us to its inherent and inevitable risks to health and safety. Popular perceptions of risks, in general and in relation to traffic accident risk in particular, are based more on intuition and judgment, rather than objective assessments (Slovic, 2002).

In this paper, after reviewing some mobilities literature and presenting some general background data, we will concentrate on pedestrian injuries, because they are marginalized by recent urban safety scholarship: there is no rush to publish or comment on everyday traffic accidents involving pedestrians as there is to pontificate in the wake of 9/11. Then we will review a range of recent papers that explore the causal connections between urban design and traffic 'accidents'. We will introduce the notion of 'walkshed' as a unit of analysis and conclude with intimations of more progressive changes.

The paper is part review and part an attempt to right the balance in discussions of urban traffic. As the more affluent move around by car and limousine, the pedestrian becomes the minor player in transport discussions, and as cities are restructured to fit the needs of the car, the needs of the pedestrian are even less considered. But even the car driver has to step out of the car at times.

While not everyone drives a car, most of us are pedestrians at some time. However, as soon you step out of your car in many if not most cities, you become a second-class citizen: it is as if your full rights only exist when you drive a car.

Walk in the city, and you are pushed to the sides of the road, a telling phrase and metaphor. When a car hits a child it is often treated as an accident, when a child hits a car it is considered vandalism. When Short (1989) writes in The Humane City of cities designed as if only some people matter, he references specifically car drivers in contrast with pedestrians. Cities are biased toward the needs of the drivers rather than the rights of the pedestrians, despite the obvious inequality. A heavy metal object traveling at even relatively low speeds does more damage to a human body than the body does to the car. People get killed and maimed; cars merely get scratched and dented.

. . . (Body of paper follows here. We jump for now to the authors' conclusions. See below for links to full article.) . . .

Conclusion

Across the globe there is an epidemic of traffic injuries and fatalities that is particularly marked in low- and middle-income countries. Almost 90 percent of traffic fatalities occur in low- and middle-income countries. The most vulnerable are pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users. The poor, the young and the old are at especially high risk.

Injury control and prevention strategies as part of a broader and deeper reorientation of cities away from a car-dominated culture toward a vehicle-pedestrian sharing culture can have significant impacts on morbidity, mortality, risk of injury and population health. These strategies include:

* Limiting and controlling speed through active and passive measures that target drivers' decisions on how fast to drive and road conditions that indirectly force drivers to reduce their average speeds;

* Organizing traffic away from residential areas, limiting inner city and business area traffic flow, and encouraging alternative modes of transportation that focus more on health benefits and non-motorized road users;

* Continuing public information programs targeting high-risk groups and vulnerable urban populations;

* Integrating urban planning and development and public health to design built environments that promote healthier lifestyles rather than safer behaviors.

Pedestrian injuries are not accidents. They are preventable. If the vulnerability of the human body was the determining factor, then it is unlikely we would design our transport system the way we have.

'Accidents' reflect and reinforce social differences: they are less accidents and more manifestations of wider and deeper inequalities in society that reflect the relative power of a vehicle-dominated as opposed to a pedestrian-dominated culture.

We need an anti-Marinetti to write a program for the future in which the city reflects the needs of the pedestrians and the frailties of the human body rather than the needs of the drivers and the power of their vehicles. It is perhaps fitting then that the same country that produced Mainetti is also home to the CittaSlow movement.

# # #

For the full text, referencess and graphics of this thought-provoking twenty page paper, please click here to : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a917906422&fulltext=713240928

Contents:
- The Modern City
- No Accident
- A Wider Context
- Urban Design and Road Safety
- The City as Urban Walkshed
- Conclusion
- References
- List of Tables

# # #

Source: The full text of this article was published in: the journal Mobilities, Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2010 , pages 41 - 59. It is reprinted here with the kind permision of the authors.

The authors:

John Rennie Short is an expert on urban issues, environmental concerns, globalization, political geography and the history of cartography. He has studied cities around the world, and lectured around the world to a variety of audiences. He is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland (UMBC). He can be contacted via jrs@umbc.edu.

Luis Mauricio Pinet Peralta holds a Ph.D in Public Policy, Health Specialty, with a background in Emergency Health Services, Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine. He is a Research Associate of the Department of Public Policy, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD. He can be contacted via lpinet1@umbc.edu.

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Honey, you gotta slow down

A bare five miles per hour over the speed limit on a city street, and . . .



Editor's comment:
It is the consistent position of this journal that much of what is wrong with our current transportation arrangements in cites could be greatly alleviated if we can find ways just to slow down. And it's not that hard. Stay tuned.

(If you click here to http://newmobilityagenda.blogspot.com/search/label/slower you will have before you all of the postings thus far published in our "slow it down" series.)

On slowth: And here is an entry we made some time back in Wikipedia on the concept of slowth to get the ball rolling. Have a look and if you are up to it, please improve.

Slowth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Slowth is a new mobility transport planning concept, usually deployed in congested urban environments, where transport is calibrated for lower top speeds, but the result is shorter overall travel times across the entire system.[1]

The concept of slowth is sometimes compared to the story of The Tortoise and the Hare; the paradoxical notion that slowing the top speeds of transport will when properly engineered allow more people to get to their destinations more quickly. An example is that where there is sufficient traffic congestion, a bicycle may get to its destination more quickly than say a Ferrari. When a city adopts a policy of slowth, the top speeds will be lower, but congestion decreases because the slower speeds result in steadier traffic flow.[1]

This is a powerful model which urban planners and traffic engineers, with a few notable exceptions, are only recently starting to take seriously. An important new mobility concept, it is also referred to as "slow transport."

In the report "Speed Control and Transport Policy" (Chapter 10, on speed limits in towns, Policy Studies Institute, 1996) Mayer Hillman and Stephen Plowden describe an experiment in Växjö, a Swedish town of 70,000, which showed very small time penalties arising from some fairly substantial speed reductions at 20 junctions. The Swedish researchers used the results to simulate what would happen if similar speed-reducing measures were introduced at 111 junctions throughout the town and concluded that there would probably be a small net time saving.[2]

In recent years it has gotten steadily increasing attention both in the literature but above all as part of the on-street sustainable transport strategies of a growing number of leading programs and projects around the world (See listing below).

See also (Hot links in Wikipedia article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowth

• Cittaslow (Slow cities movement, in English)
• Home zones
• Livable Streets
• New Mobility Agenda
• Pedestrian#edestrianisation
• Public space management
• Road traffic control
• Shared space
• Slow movement
• Street hierarchy
• Sustainable transportation
• Traffic calming
• Walkability
• Walking
• Woonerf
• World Streets

Again, please consider adding to and improving this article.

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Honk! Complex thinking on reducing traffic signals in cities

What is that old saw that goes something like "the definition of high intelligence is the ability to keep two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time without ones head exploding?" Well, whatever the exact wording there is no doubt that this is an imperative capability for making wise policy in terms of our transportation arrangements. Here is an exchange taken from several leading newmobility discussion fora, which offers some complex views on the advantages of removing at least some, possibly many, traffic lights from our cities. Maybe.

This exchange took place on the several indicated discussion fora.

Mayor identifies 140 traffic signals for removal

Source: http://www.transportxtra.com/magazines/local_transport_today/news/?id=21956

-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Eric Britton
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 4:09 PM
To: NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com; Sustran-discuss@list.jca.apc.org; WorldStreets@yahoogroups.com;
Subject: London Mayor identifies 140 traffic signals for removal

Transport for London has identified 140 traffic signals across the capital that may no longer perform a useful role and could be removed.

Officials are finalising the collection of data on traffic flows and accidents from each site to verify that the signals are no longer useful in traffic, pedestrian or safety terms.

David Brown, TfL's managing director for surface transport, told last week's meeting of the TfL board that 28 sets of traffic signals had already been removed in the capital this financial year, ten of which were on TfL's road network.

Board members also received an update on the proposed trial of pedestrian 'countdown' signals. TfL submitted plans to the DfT at the beginning of March to trial the technology at eight locations in the capital. If approval is granted the first trial site could be installed as early as June.

Countdown signals will show pedestrians how many seconds are left in the 'blackout' period - the phase between the green man being extinguished and road traffic receiving a green light.

Brown also provided the board with details of TfL's lane rental plans under which utility companies would have to pay a charge for the time they occupy the road when conducting streetworks.

Brown said utility companies could avoid paying the charge if they undertook work at non-traffic sensitive times or employed "innovative working practices" so that the carriageway was returned to traffic use at peak times.

Brown said TfL's plans would need amendments to existing legislation. Lane rental powers were included in the New Roads and Streetworks Act but have only ever been trialled, in Camden and Middlesbrough.

Transport minister Sadiq Khan said in December that the DfT would consult on lane rental this summer and that regulations could be introduced in October 2011. They would only be available for use on the "most sensitive roads in the most congested urban areas".

(Thanks to Ian Perry for the heads-up)


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Bishop, Delhi
Sent: Monday, 05 April, 2010 08:01
To: Eric Britton
Subject: RE: [sustran] London Mayor identifies 140 traffic signals for removal

Dear Madhav, Paul, and Everyone,

This raises an interesting issue Eric. Here in Delhi you may be aware that there are a comparatively very small number of signals, 700 whereas London has around 6,500 for a similar land area and lower population density.

In some senses then you have 'naked streets' in Delhi. However, on most roads in the city this is an unenviable state of affairs. The rising motorized middle class neither want to see more signals hindering their path and are pushing for 'signal free' stretches where they can drive non-stop and unhindered. The results are there to be found in the road casualty statistics.

In this scenario I find myself arguing for the implementation of many more signals in Delhi precisely because the 'roads' are designed to facilitate car movement (ironically like many of the 'roads' in London too). There is also an 'imperialistic' attitude towards vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists, ignored most of the time and hooted at when they get in the way. So called zebras are worth less than the paint they use to make them with.

A combination of these reasons leads me to think that it is very well to have naked streets when a) you clearly have a 'street' and not a 'road' (many of the 'colonies' or residential areas here in Delhi would come under this category and could work as such with minor traffic calming measures, and b) equally importantly, you have a sufficiently 'democratic' approach to the use of road space and a respect for vulnerable modes. It is questionable that both exist in Delhi or London.

I'm a bit out of touch with London but I understand that Boris also wants to remove signals because they are a hindrance to motorized vehicles. If this is the case then I'm afraid I'm not in favor of the concept. The UK has a long way to go to reach the attitudes of Dutch drivers when it comes to sharing the road - one of the main reasons because cycling is still an activity of health freaks and eccentrics (so you're not mowing down a friend or family member if you drive fast).

In the UK there has to be a change in mindset and an effort to remove all of the risk averse, health and safety regulatory culture which leads local authorities to make roads out of streets if naked streets are to work. At the same time, we have to start somewhere and attitudes will change when our urban environment becomes more friendly to vulnerable users, so let's get the ball rolling.

In London removing signals could be started on quieter streets with appropriately designed traffic calming measures. Delhi could leapfrog London by going straight ahead for traffic calming on streets. But in London and Delhi signals are still needed on main roads designed for traffic movement.

I have an idea, Boris can give the signals he's removing to Delhi to put on their roads..... Who could facilitate this I wonder?

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Cycling should be dull

" (Government) policy is not to make cycling safer but to encourage more people to be brave." The author, Janice Turner writing for the Times, puts her finger on one of the greater truths of public policy and cycling, which every city and every New Mobility activist will do well to bear in mind. In her words: "Cycling. . . should be banal. Because it is safe"
Cycling should be dull, not an extreme sport

- Janice Turner, The Times, London, UK

"We must overthrow the cult of the car and the Lycra-clad vanguard of aggressive men, if more of us are to take to our bikes"

Source: Cycling should be dull, not an extreme sport

I cycled to the Treasury on Tuesday to interview the Chancellor. All along Horse Guards the railings were plastered in police notices: bicycles chained to them would be removed, detonated possibly, since the fear is bike bombs, which crop up in conflicts from Vietnam through to Ireland and Iraq. In the end, my foldable was carried inside by a kind civil servant, trying not to get oil on his suit.

Cyclists are not welcome visitors to any public offices: Parliament, Portcullis House, Downing Street. You’d think someone would set up a token rack beyond where ministers might be vaporised by bombs. But whatever the political posturing inside, outside it’s still two wheels bad. And one wonders if things will change if/when George Osborne, who every morning can be spied freewheeling through Hyde Park, finally dismounts at the Treasury.

The pedalling Tories — George, Dave and Boris — are often mocked by Labour as poseurs, snapping on green credentials like cycle clips. But they merely reflect their class and generation. In the past two years, with Tube strikes and terror threats, the number of London cyclists has doubled: clustered at every intersection is a mob of professional, affluent, under-40, Georgie-boys.

Indeed, to cycle in Britain today you must embody Tory philosophy: be a rugged fearless individual, wholly responsible for your destiny, battling against the collectivism of bendy buses and the red tape of illogical one-way systems. Norman Tebbit, after all, instructed the jobless to get on their bikes, not the train


The trouble is, to judge by that microcosm of our blue future, the London mayoralty, Tory policy is not to make cycling safer but to encourage more people to be brave. Transport for London bangs on about Boris’s 12 new “cycle superhighways”, which will sweep into the centre from disparate suburbs. Will these routes have barriers so the two-wheeled are finally safe from being squished beneath Land Cruisers? Er, no. For the main part, we will still be playing dodgems with buses and now motorcycles — yes, cheers Boris, for adding veering Vespas to our worries. The mayor’s cycle superhighways, it turns out, are just lines on a map.

And yet last Sunday, from St Paul’s to Buck House, cars were banned from London streets for the mayor’s Skyride. Around 65,000 people gloried in our city, rode beside our pink-cheeked children without, for once, picturing the wobble that would land them under a truck. Oh, if only it were like this every day, we all cried, as if ordinary citizens — oldsters on uprights, little girls on pink Barbie trikes, hipsters in unfeasibly high heels, tweed suits on rusty butcher’s bikes — just getting around safely on two wheels was a fantasy.

Because elsewhere cyclists are just that: a random cross-section of humanity. Not a Lycra-clad male vanguard pumped with aggression and self-righteousness. In Europe’s top three cycling nations — Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands — timorous old people cycle, women as often as men, children bike off unaccompanied to school. Cycling is not a moral manifesto or a carbon offset. It does not require DayGlo or £500 alloy wheels or attitude. Cycling is, as it should be, banal. Because it is safe


Yes, you might say, those countries have always cycled, just like their women have never shaved their armpits: it’s their way, not ours. Actually, a fascinating report, Making Cycling Irresistible, by the American academics John Puchera and Ralph Buehler, reveals that in the early 1950s cycling in Britain and Denmark started tailing off as car ownership increased. Indeed, for some years, we were keener bikers than were the Danes. The difference was, in the mid-1970s, the governments of Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands resolved to stop the car’s dominance of the streets and championed the bike and pedestrian while the British allowed our townscapes to be ground beneath the wheels of the car. And yet these three continental countries own just as many cars per head as we do — the Germans more — it’s just that, unlike us, they aren’t glued into their driving seats.

Now only 1 per cent of our journeys are on bikes, in the Netherlands it is 27 per cent. And the reason is simple: a British cyclist is three times more likely than a Dutch one to die per miles travelled — even though only 3 per cent of Dutch cyclists wear a helmet. In Britain safety is seen as a matter for the individual, not government policy: yet it is highways, not helmets, that save lives.

And with quite extraordinary far-sightedness, these three countries built endless miles of barriered lanes along major roads but, more importantly, in many residential streets cars were slowed to a crawl and compelled to give way to bikes. And to enforce this, the law assumed, unless otherwise proved, that in an accident between a vehicle and a cyclist, the driver was at fault. Last week when that very principle was suggested here by Cycling England, there was a predictable furore about a (snore) Lycra louts’ charter.

But maybe it would make the idiot motorists who pelt down my 20mph street obey the law. Maybe it would have encouraged the left-turning HGV lorries who in London this year killed six female cyclists (women being vulnerable because we tend to ride defensively, hugging the kerb) to check their mirrors. Two fitness instructors, a film producer, a Goldsmiths’ graduate, a City director and an architect: those women were not loutish at all.

The answer to so many intractable modern problems — obesity, urban congestion, global warming — is cycling. What now feels like an extreme sport should be the default mode of transport. But it has dawned on me only recently that the big fat flaw at the heart of democracy is that politicians will never invest in the long term if voters’ initial inconvenience and expense are not rewarded with results before an election. And it will take years and billions to chip away at the cult of the car, to erect multistorey bicycle parks in every mainline station, to build genuinely super highways for bikes through our towns and reverse years of destructive urban planning.

Only when the fear is gone will big jessies stop riding on pavements, maniacs stop charging red lights, the streets be reclaimed from cars, and cycling from angry men with tiny bums. Do the Tories have the cojones to do it? Or is that just padding I see in their cycle shorts?

####

The author
Janice Turner joined The Times in 2003 from The Guardian, and writes mainly, but not exclusively, on family matters and women's issues. Her column appears on Saturdays.

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Learning from each other: New York looks at London (So who are you looking at?)

We started World Series last year not because we felt that we were going to tell you everything you need to know about sustainable transportation, but rather to offer you a lively independent platform with worldwide coverage in which all of those of us were concerned with these issues can exchange ideas and commentaries freely. Here is a good example of a shared learning process that does not have to stop with the two cities directly involved in this report.

How London Is Saving Lives With 20 MPH Zones

- Noah Kazis reports from New York.

When Mayor Bloomberg announced that the new pedestrian spaces in Midtown are here to stay, he made special note of the safety improvements on Broadway, which he called "reason enough to make this permanent." And after the mayor told reporters that the city was getting lots of requests for similar livable streets treatments, the speculation started: What's next?

To replicate the Midtown street safety benefits throughout the five boroughs, New York could look to the example of the UK, where 20 mph zones have reduced automobile speeds across the country.

The global city that perhaps most closely resembles NYC -- London -- has been installing 20 mph zones for the last decade, and they are saving lives. Already, 27 fewer Londoners are killed or seriously injured each year because of them.

The standard speed limit in London, as in New York, is 30 mph. Since 2001, however, London has built more than four hundred 20 mph zones, as described in a 2009 report by the London Assembly [PDF]. The zones are located in residential neighborhoods or near areas of high pedestrian activity, like schools. As of last year, they covered 11 percent of the total road length of the city.

The safety effects of the 20 mph zones have been enormous for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. In London, serious traffic injuries and fatalities have fallen by 46 percent within the zones, according to the prestigious British Medical Journal. Deaths and serious injuries sustained by children have dropped 50 percent. There's even a small spillover effect, with areas immediately adjacent to 20 mph zones seeing an eight percent reduction in total injuries and deaths. The science is so clear that in 2004 the World Health Organization endorsed 20 mph speeds as an essential strategy to save lives.

These 20 mph zones do much more than change a digit on speed limit signs. London's zones include a host of traffic calming measures to make the speed limit self-enforcing: road humps, raised junctions, chicanes, and raised crosswalks are the most common. Increasingly, speed cameras are used to enforce lower speeds.

When paired with hard hitting public service announcements like these, London is addressing each of the three E's of traffic safety: engineering, enforcement, and education. As a result, the 20 mph zones really work, silencing skeptics who claimed that Londoners would just keep driving as they always had. As implemented, overall speeds in London's 20 mph zones have decreased by nine miles per hour, according to the London Assembly report. Transport for London recently recommended 880 more sites for the traffic-slowing treatment.

Across the UK, the last few years have seen a shift away from engineering-intensive 20 mph zones and toward blanket 20 mph speed limits. Nationally, two million people now live on streets with 20 mph speed limits.

The impetus for this strategy came from Europe, said Rod King, the director of the national 20's Plenty For Us campaign. While visiting a German town famous for its large population of cyclists, King was surprised to see that the town's bike infrastructure wasn't particularly developed. Instead, he said, "In the early 90s, they reduced the speed limit on all residential roads to 30 kilometers per hour," or 18.6 mph.

Inspired, King helped bring the idea back to the UK. After starting within the bike advocate community, the push to slow down cars quickly expanded. Advocates for pedestrian safety, public health, and even some safety-minded driving groups quickly banded together behind the idea. "It's been accelerating dramatically in the last two years," said John Whitelegg, a professor of sustainable transport and a local councillor in Lancaster.

One benefit of changing an entire city or neighborhood to 20 mph speed limits is the cost, which King says may average 50 times less than London-style 20 mph zones. Another plus is that a uniform speed limit reduces confusion over constantly changing rules.

Perhaps the most convincing argument for a blanket 20 mph speed limit is that it helps residents buy into the concept of driving more slowly. According to King, the fiercest opposition comes from those who have to drive through 20 mph speed limits but still live on fast-moving streets. "They don't own the benefits of the 20 mph zone where they live," he said, "but they still have to pay the cost." When a large contiguous area is covered by lower speed limits, it's easier for everyone to make the psychological switch to slower speeds.

Today, 20 mph streets enjoy widespread popular support. The London Assembly noted that three-quarters of UK residents favor the use of 20 mph zones, though the country strongly prefers enforcement cameras to physical calming measures.

Despite their current popularity, it wasn't easy to make 20 mph roads a reality. After a 1996 report by the national Department for Transport showed how much safer slower streets would be, it took another three years for the national government to allow local governments to reduce speed limits without explicit approval. Political opposition was often intense. Many conservatives "take the point of view that the correct approach to road safety is just for parents to teach their children correctly," said Whitelegg.

Over the last few years, however, 20 mph speed limits have been sweeping across the UK. Portsmouth recently became the first British city where every residential street has a 20 mph speed limit, and nine others have already committed themselves to doing the same, according to Whitelegg. Eight of London's 32 boroughs are moving towards a blanket 20 mph speed limit. The national Department of Transport is recommending 20 mph limits for all urban residential streets.

Over a relatively short time, a broad swath of British cities and towns accustomed to 30 mph speeds have embraced the safety and quality of life that slow streets have brought. If any big city in America is ready to follow suit, it should be New York, where more people live without cars than in London.

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About the author:
Noah Kazis began writing for Streetsblog in January 2010, after writing at TheCityFix DC. He is a recent graduate of Yale College, where he wrote his senior essay on the importance of social class in the politics of transportation reform in New York City. When Noah was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox.

Source. This article orginallyh appeared in Streetsblog on 22 March. Rrefernce: http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/03/22/how-london-is-saving-lives-with-20-mph-zones/

Note: The mentioned 46 page 2009 report by the London Assembly, "Braking point: 20mph speed limits in London" is available in PDF form here: http://www.london.gov.uk/archive/assembly/reports/transport/braking-point-20mph.pdf

Editor's note:
It has been the firm position of World Streets from the beginning that "Twenty is plenty" and that is a good idea for any and every city in the world. Maybe you remember David Levinger's good ("Honey you got to slow down".

Here are a few more past articles from Streets on slowing down more generally that you may wish to check out - http://newmobilityagenda.blogspot.com/search/label/slower.

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Message from Mumbai: Streets are for People

When we set out to lay the base for this journal in 2008, we never for a moment considered calling it "World Roads". Our focus was and is on the fact that if roads are for vehicles, streets are definitely for people. Let us have a look at what one young "lapsed engineer from India" has to say about this in the context of his home city of Mumbai, with lessons that ring just as true in places like Manhattan, Madrid, Melbourne . . . or surely your city as well.

Creating Streets for Walkers and Hawkers

This post is intended as a follow-up to Erica Schlaikjer’s recent post about the new “skywalks” in Mumbai. She highlighted several common criticisms – that these elevated walkways are inaccessible for the old and the disabled, that they destroy the vibrancy of streets and that they are poor alternatives to solving the real problem: the automobile. She also suggests, though, that skywalks might bring “welcome change” for cities like Mumbai, where pedestrians walk in extremely unsafe conditions.

It becomes clear from a cursory study, however, that Mumbai planners do not necessarily view skywalks as a solution for improved safety, but rather, increased pedestrian flow. The idea is to move pedestrians up and away, making room for everyone else down below, including motorists and illegal street vendors who encroach on footpaths.

But to pit walkers against hawkers is to ignore the real problem. A real solution would preserve the vibrancy of Mumbai’s street-level marketplaces. Most importantly, it would be about getting pedestrians to their destinations, not about getting pedestrians off the roads so that motorists have a free pass.

Hawkers Welcome

A Wall Street Journal slideshow shows pictures of what’s squeezing sidewalks around western neighbourhoods in Mumbai. It has pictures of phone booths and cobbler stalls, and vendors selling coconuts, sugarcane juice and vegetables. The message is clear: street vendors refuse to budge, so the city planners are being forced to make extra space for pedestrians to move.

When the problem is formulated that way, the proposed solution – an elevated walkway – seems to be the obvious solution. Indeed, this seems to be the logic behind the decision to build them. “We clear [the street vendors] and they just come back,” an MMRDA official is quoted as saying. “That’s why we thought, ‘Let’s create some additional space on the road by going elevated.’ ”

It is of course true that encroachment reduces the space available for pedestrians. Debris and electrical equipment and advertisement boards placed in the middle of the sidewalk are especially dangerous (as this good professor found out — he fell on the pavement and broke six ribs while trying to step around a billboard.) But not everything that disrupts pedestrian flow is bad. Trees, for example, take up a great deal of space on already narrow footpaths. But they also provide shade, without which it is impossible to walk in the summer.

Street vendors also offer crucial services to pedestrians. I have walked all my life in Indian cities, and the luxury of knowing that I can find a vendor selling something to eat or drink every hundred meters is much more important to me than having a perfectly designed footpath with no encroachments.

Several commentators have stressed on this point. William Whyte – the famous chronicler of pedestrian behavior in New York – speaks of pedestrians in Tokyo being drawn to vendors even when the entire street has been opened up for walkers. Streets with shoeshine people, for example, are some of the most preferable busiest spaces.

Elsewhere, Dr. Geetam Tiwari, associate professor of transport planning at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, argues that “pedestrians need cobblers on the road to have their footwear fixed, just as much as car owners need tyre repair shops… All commuters need cold drinks, snacks and other services on the roadside. These services have to exist at frequent intervals, otherwise walking or bicycling would become impossible, especially in summer.” These principles are valid internationally, but they are especially applicable to India.

It is also important to note that the skywalks cannot take the pedestrians everywhere. In most cases, the skywalks will serve only a fraction of the pedestrians. In West Mulund, for example, the proposed skywalk provided no connectivity to the northern portions of the locality. It was fiercely opposed by people whose livelihood depends on the vitality of neighbourhood markets and people who have little hope of improved access due to the skywalk, and eventually, the MMRDA had to cancel the project.

What About Safety?

In my experience, walking is not very dangerous when you are walking along the road, even if a footpath is absent. Especially in Mumbai, pedestrians have safety in numbers (watch this video of people heading into Dadar Station during rush hour — organized chaos.) Things get really risky only when pedestrians have to cross busy roads, in other words, when they have to interact with motorists. And even with a skywalk, most users will have to walk the last quarter-mile on the roads, in the midst of motorists.

So the solution, then, must address the problems of pedestrians at-grade, where men returning from work can eat a vada-pav before going home for dinner, where working women can buy vegetables and look longingly at the latest fashions in sarees, and where kids can guiltily eat ice-cream. While hawkers need to be regulated, they must also be recognized as essential to Mumbai’s street-life.

Views from the Street

Photo by Arun Shanbhag.

Photo by Sayali Santosh Kadam

Photo by Kunal Bhatia.

The Proposal

Let’s take Mulund West as an example of a proposed skywalk project. It is a classic case of a solution being misapplied. Mulund is a largely residential suburb where the railway station is surrounded by a thriving market area. The traders were against the skywalk because they feared that it would reduce their sales. The map below shows the area served by the railway station (in brown), the market area (in red), and the proposed skywalk (in blue). Clearly, the skywalk would serve only a small portion of the community.

West Mulund, Mumbai, India. Image via Google.

Alternate Solution

If I had to make an alternative plan for this area, I would make the market area a non-motorised zone and reserve the main approach road to the station for public transport and para-transit. I propose that during rush hour, four arterial roads from the station (shown in blue) be redesigned to allow only non-motorized vehicles, buses and auto-rickshaws (three-wheeler taxis), and four cross-streets (shown in green) be preserved for non-motorized use only. These steps would have to be complemented with improvements in outer streets, including the redesign of the footpaths, restrictions for on-street parking, and the construction of off-street parking facilities.

Why would such a plan work? First, we know from experience that pedestrian-friendly streets are great for commerce. Second, it provides more opportunities for improved BRT and auto-rickshaw services for the more distant areas served by the Mulund railway station. Lastly, the most harrowing part of the daily walk suddenly becomes a lot safer and a lot more fun. For the majority of commuters in Mulund who either walk or use public transport, this would be a strong improvement.

MMRDA has been proposing a single solution – a skywalk – for fifty different localities in the Mumbai metropolitan region. But even if some areas do need skywalks, other areas might have different needs. The needs of people in Andheri/Mulund are obviously different from the needs of people in Bandra.

Instead of choosing a solution first and then scouting around the city for problems to solve, the planners should study the problem first and then find the best solution. Then, perhaps the “caterpillars” (as the skywalks are called) won’t have to crawl in the sky. Instead, they would be on the earth, where they belong.

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Credit: This article originally appered in The City Fix Mumbia on 10 February at http://mumbai.thecityfix.com/creating-streets-for-walkers-and-hawkers/. Kind thanks to the author and the editor for sharing.

About the author:

I'm a lapsed engineer from India who found that making cars was not as much fun as getting rid of them. This discovery brought me to Rutgers University, where I am currently doing my masters in City and Regional Planning and assisting Voorhees Transporation Center in its research.I spend my free time listening to Indian Classical Music, playing bridge or reading one of Jane Austen's novels for the millionth time.

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Listening to children

Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice
Volume 15, Number 1. March 2010

Editorial - John Whitelegg:

This issue contains two articles that on first reading may appear totally unrelated. This is not the case. The Kinnersly article – "Transport and climate change on a planet near you " - is a comprehensive reflection on the links between economic growth, poor quality democracy, lack of will to deal with sustainability and biodiversity and the perversity of reckless decision taking that supports a business as usual (BAU) model of the world.


Tranter and O‟Brien in "Positive psychology, walking and well-being: Can walking school buses survive a policy of school closure?", show convincingly and persuasively that a child-centred policy based on listening to children, thinking about the wider issues around children and the journey to school can bring about a very different outcome to the ones currently on offer.

Kinnersly‟s well-founded worries about BAU are neatly dealt with by the child-centred model (CCM) advanced by Tranter and O‟Brien. Equally there will be other non-BAU models that raise alternative visions and perspectives and this journal want to hear from older people, those with mobility difficulties and those who live in the accessibility poor “facility deserts” that we have created in many British cities.

It is clear from both articles in this issue that we cannot expect intelligent, ethical, human-centred, quality of life outcomes from our expert led, neo-classical economics, “bean counter”, top-down perspectives.

The failure of the Copenhagen climate change summit last December which is dealt with by Kinnersly captures these points in a rather dramatic manner. It is clear that whatever was going on in Copenhagen it was nothing to do with a human-centred, ethical view of the world and nothing to do with precautionarity or quality of life.

We are lucky that the politicians and world leaders who drew up the failed “accord” in Copenhagen last December were not around in the first couple of decades of the 19th Century. If they had been around they would have presented a wonderful story in favour of continuing the business known as “slavery”. Slavery is after all very good for the economy, it would be disruptive to ban it, any ill-informed criticism of slavery can only result in “foreigners” benefitting from the desirable business model and it will still be there anyway. Abolishing slavery was not easy but luckily there was a different mood around and it was done.

Kinnersly also represents a valuable tradition in the development of so-called western civilisation. Like David Engwicht in Australia (see end note) he has thought about his subject matter very deeply and produced a fine intellectual product with a strong policy resonance.

This is lacking in the ranks of professional planners, economists, traffic engineers and others and highlights the need for “citizen science” or productive engagement between the professionals and those who have something highly intelligent to say. This productive engagement does not exist at the moment. Our professional world of science and expert evidence has produced an arrogant, dismissive model of the universe.

The dismissive model applies to children. Asking children about the journey to school as described in Tranter and O‟Brien is a brilliant way of sorting out what we should be doing for children and is more likely to produce more active travel, less obesity and happier children than high-blown waffle in official documents.

Clearly we do not listen to children and like Tranter and O‟Brien. I have heard
children speak eloquently about roads and traffic and against the closure of their school and seen a completely dismissive response. The roads and traffic policies continue to ignore children and to prioritise the needs of the person in the car to the detriment of the child on foot or bike and a very fine secondary school in Hornby (Lancashire, UK) much-loved by its local community, was closed in spite of massive protest and a unanimous vote by a group of councillors to keep it open.

This is now being repeated in the decision to close Skerton primary school in a deprived community in Lancaster UK which will produce the result of exposing children to severe traffic danger as they travel to more distant schools.

This issue contains important messages about a desirable future, the real need for alternatives to BAU and the importance of other voices, and we look forward to more of this in future issues

John Whitelegg Editor

Engwicht, D. (2005) The smarter way Envirobook, Annandale, Wales, Australia

Abstracts & Keywords

Transport and climate change on a planet near you
Patrick Kinnersly Creating a sustainable transport system requires more than merely reducing carbon emissions from vehicles. A superficial greening of transport is essential to the continued expansion demanded by a market-driven model of unlimited growth, inducing further carbon emissions and resource conflicts and preventing the sustainable development required to avert climate crisis.

Keywords: Transport, climate change, carbon emissions, economic growth, environment

Positive psychology, walking and well-being: can walking school buses survive a policy of school closures?
Catherine O‟Brien and Paul J. Tranter Children provide an insight into our understanding of the link between walking and happiness, as walking is a playful experience for them. Many adults make trips simply because they are focussed on getting to a destination. Children on the other hand, are more often able to enjoy the “places” along the way, rather than being focused on the “next task.” Evidence from positive psychology indicates that happiness and positive emotions contribute to our health and well-being. Slowing down, enjoying life's pleasures, and appreciating our friends, community and environment are all linked to enhanced well-being. Despite an awareness of such benefits, government policies can often be seen as undermining well-being, even by discouraging walking to school by children. This paper examines the impact of a policy of school closures on the viability of walking school buses.

Keywords: positive psychology, walking school buses, children, community, environment

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* Click here for full issue: http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/pdf/wtpp15.4.pdf

About the authors:



For the past decade Catherine O'Brien has been leading efforts in Canada to create child and youth friendly communities and Catherine is currently developing child and youth friendly land use and transport planning friendly guidelines for every Canadian province. More recently, she has been exploring how sustainability and happiness studies can contribute to a more sustainable future. Catherine is an education professor at Cape Breton University where she developed the first university course in the world on sustainable happiness! Articles on sustainable happiness can be found at www.sustainablehappiness.ca. Catherine lives in Sydney, Nova Scotia with her husband, two teenage children, a dog, a cat, and a turtle.


Paul Tranter is Associate Professor in Geography in the University of New South Wales. He writes: "Creating resilient cities? It’s child’s play! Paul’s research in the areas of child-friendly environments, effective speed, road safety and sustainable transport, has led him to the realisation that if we can create environments where children can playfully and safely explore their neighbourhoods and cities, we will also be creating places that are happier, healthier and more livable for all city residents, both now and in the future."

Patrick Kinnersly describes himself as follows: "Patrick blames Mrs Thatcher for turning him into a transport activist. After two decades campaigning against the hazards of work he escaped to write a novel, but wherever he went one of her ‘roads to prosperity’ was heading for the place. In 1993 he helped form an alliance of local groups that dismantled government plans for a ‘superhighway’ between the M27 and the M4. They had to do it again as local councils revived dead schemes for their own ‘strategic corridors’. It took ten years and a fortune in professional fees to make ministers reject the last of these ‘undead’ roads. Such victories are rare. Expanding roads, runways and ports still dominates transport policy - and the lives of objectors with better things to do. But the folly is so obvious it may not need a novel to expose it!"


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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"We need faster horses."

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". - Henry Ford

Hmm, sounds quite good but, well, I am not quite sure how I feel about this -- but anyway those are Henry Ford's famous words, as quoted by German Federal President Horst Köhler in a challenging speech on January 14th of this year to ADAC, Germany's and Europe's largest automobile club - a speech widely ignored by the German media.

He then added this: "In other words, mobility has to be thought ahead. You, leading representatives of the car industry, be ahead of your customers! The phrase "that's what the customers wanted" is not set in stone for all eternity. As leaders you have a responsibility to lead. And part of that is to recognize shifts in the tide - on the markets and in society - and to react promptly and get new products ready for the market."

The fact that he then segues into the importance of a massive move into electric cars troubles; it repeats one bad old habit of some parts of the political and administrative establishment in many places, which is to assume that they somehow can make wise determinations about technology. They cannot. That's not their competence, that's not their job. What we expect of wise governance is to set ambitious, but achievable performance parameters, standards if you will, that lead us toward better, cleaner, safer and fairer mobility. But not to tell us which technology is best suited to do the job. They, quit frankly, do not and can not know.

And in any event if you ask me, what we need is slower horses. It's at least a start. Someone please tell that to whoever it is in Germany who continue to resist setting speed limits on the autobahn.

You can read the full text of his talk which touches on matters of mobility, technology, entrepreneurship and governance here: http://www.bundespraesident.de/en/Speeches-,11165.661675/Speech-by-Federal-President-Ho.htm?global.back=/en/-%2c11165%2c0/Speeches.htm%3flink%3dbpr_liste.

Thanks to Markus Heller of Autofrei Wohnen in Berlin and Pascal van den Noort of VeloMondial in Amsterdam for the heads-up.

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Car Free Days: 1. Origins & Timeline

"Every day is a great day to take a few cars off the street and think about it."
Here is how the car-free days movement got started and has taken shape over the last 15 years. You will find the full story in the World Car-Free Days Consortium website at www.worldcarfreedays.com. * And the latest car free day news here.

Quick background

Think this business of hauling all or most of the cars off the streets for a day of public reflection and dialogue is brand new stuff? Think again. In the world we live in the building of knowledge and the creation of a new consensus for change on matters of technology and society is a deliberate and almost always very indirect process. Rarely are there single persons or groups who all by themselves make the difference. Rather there is this slow, often irritatingly slow, cumulative process of assimilation of ideas, attempted actions, not all of which crowned by immediate success, and changing perceptions which occasionally combine, here and there, to change first attitudes and then, with any luck at all, some of the salient and important choices that we all make together which shape our daily lives, and those of our cities.

The Car Free Day "movement" has over the years been faithful to this formula as the following "timeline" suggests. Beginning in the fifties and mainly in the States back then as the first ill-clad doughty local groups began to assemble here and there in order to protest the intrusions of cars in their cities and neighborhoods, here are some of the main benchmarks which we have culled from our own observations and experience over this period. (Anything missing, wrong, or poorly explained here. If so, let us know and we can try to rectify.)

Our own involvement with the idea of hauling all the cars off the street from time to time and in the process inviting citizens to think and talk about it as a step in the process of rethinking the transportation arrangements in their city, traces back to a public challenge issued back in October 1994 in an international conference that we had a role in organizing with the Spanish government in Toledo Spain under the title Ciudades Accesibles.. The challenge took the form of a paper distributed to the meeting, under the title of "Thursday - A Breakthrough Strategy for Reducing Car Dependence in Cities", the full text of which is available here.

Subsequent to the Toledo meeting, this site was set up under The Commons as one of the first to go onto the Web, which was then followed up in late 1997 by the Car Free Cafe which serves us all to this day. Within a bit more than a year the first car free day projects were planned and implemented by teams in Reykjavik, Bath and La Rochelle, all of whom were present at the Toledo meeting. Then in October 1997 we debriefed a team at the French Ministry of the Environment on the Thursday approach, subsequent to which they launched their national "En ville sans ma voiture" project. Etc. Etc.


Internationalization of the Car Free Day experiment

While the first formally government mandated national Car Free Day program was without a doubt France's "En ville sans ma voiture" ("In town without my car") program which got underway in 1998, and which continues in various forms to this day, it is only fair to tip our hat to the British Environmental Transport Association (ETA) who opened the way by coordinating three annual National Car Free Days in Britain since 1997. Equally it is useful to recall that their Green Transport Week program also provided a model for the European Commission's later extension of this approach to Europe as a whole.

Likewise, it merits mention that the Germans got the jump on the French as well with their Germany-wide Car Free Mobility Day - Mobil Ohne Auto, that first took place on June 21 1998, and which also continues to this day. Shortly thereafter the Italians, Belgians and other jumped in with their own national programs. (A good idea has many fathers and mothers.)

A major and very powerful bump in the road came in February 2000 when the City of Bogata organized in cooperation with the World Car Free Day Consortium its first Car Free Day, Sin mi carro en Bogotá, the world's first large scale "Thursday" CFD project which resulted no less in keeping some 850,000 private cars in their garages for thirteen hours of alternative transportation and thinking about it. The join project was later awarded the prestigious Stockholm Challenge Prize for Environment in June 2000. The success of the Bogotá project spilled over to contacts with officials of the city of Chengdu of Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China, who organized China's first Car Free Day on 14 October 2000. Clearly the virus was spreading.

Stretching beyond national frontiers, the first international Car Free Day program was launched by the European Commission in September 2000, followed two months later by the first ">Earth Car Free Day, a joint project of the Earth Day Network under the leadership of World Car Free DaysWorld Car Free Days. The contribution of the Commission to keeping this flame lit, not always sunder the easiest of circumstances, has been a very important one. Probably the single person most responsible for this has been Margot Wallström, first as Commissioner for Environment and more recently as vice-president of the Commission. This personal long term commitment has meant a lot, as well as the low key, decentralized, open door approach which the Commission has increasingly taken in all this.

Today, more than a decade later, with the Car Free Day movement having at long last gaining real momentum and international prominence, and in the process a certain respectability before the same administrations and bureaucracies that were certainly not among their best friends and loyal supporters until quite recently, it is important that we retain sight of the actual origins of these impulses for change. If we can remember this, we might all be a bit more open to the next good idea that tries to make its way onto the stage and move us toward a more sustainable way of life, rather than turning our backs and sticking with the good old status quo.


Timeline: Some Major Car Free (Days) Benchmarks


The following chronology assembles some of the main benchmark events of the last decades, which together have gradually built on each other's accomplishments to leave us today with a movement that is, to say the least, only now beginning to get under way. (Please understand that this is intended only as a starting point and there are a very large number of cities and events that are not covered here. Of course. But it does hit a number of the main international highlights, and certainly can serve to give you an idea of the increasing momentum of the C/FD movement in cities around the world.)

1. 1958, New York. Demonstrations of neighbors of the Washington Square Park area of New York City eventually block proposed extension of Fifth Avenue, which would have eliminated this popular public park and social oasis.
2. 1961, New York. One of the ring leaders of the 1958 demonstration, Jane Jacobs, publishes The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books, opening up the discussions of car restraint in cities
3. Autumn, 1968, Gronigen, Netherlands. First neighborhood Woonerf
4. The goal of this at first entirely illegal project led by local residents was to claim back the street for cars and create safe space for people
5. 1972, Delft, The Netherlands. First "official" Woonerf opened
6. 1973, Abbaye de Royaumont, France
7. The OECD Development Center and EcoPlan (The Commons) organize 4 day international brainstorm on combining car restraint and non-conventional or "in-between" transit (paratransit) in Third World cities
8. January-February, 1974, Switzerland
9. Four Car Free Sundays organized and greatly enjoyed by all during "Oil Crisis"
10. December 15th, 1974. Bogota, Colombia.
11. There was a 3-hour street closing along 3.9km of major roads which would later be expanded and named "Ciclovía". Organized by "Propicia" and the local transit agency. There were more than 5000 participants.
12. 1981, East Germany (DDR). First German Car Free Day takes place.
13. October 1988, Paris. "Cities without Cars?" program begins. International, unstructured, non-bureaucratic, topic-driven, long term cooperative program launched by EcoPlan and The Commons. (Later morphs into today's New Mobility Agenda
14. September 1991, New York. First International Conference on Auto-Free Cities. Organized by Transportation Alternatives
15. September 1992, San Francisco. Critical Mass. More or less anarchist, at least self-organizing, group cranks up to take back the streets from cars. Still at it.
16. Fall 1992, Paris, France. First New Mobility Forum opens in cooperation with ECTF on Internet. Car Free day concept discussed and expanded on this international list.
17. Fall 1992, Ottawa, Canada. Auto-Free Ottawa Newsletter started.
18. March 1994, Amsterdam. Car Free Cities Network Launched by DG XI and Eurocities
19. 14 October 1994, Toledo, Spain. Thursday: Car Free Day Proposal, work plan and public call for international collaboration presented at Spanish "Ciudades Accesibles" Congress. (Representatives of Car Free Cities and future Reykjavik, Bath and La Rochelle CFD projects all present.)
20. Winter 1994/5: Long term international contact/support CFD program created on the Web under The Commons and the New Mobility Agenda
21. 8 May 1996, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Declaration Issued by international meeting of European government groups.
22. 5 June 1996, Reykjavik, Iceland. Car Free Day Organized by local government and held in Iceland's capital city.
23. 11th June 1996, Bath, U.K. Bath Car Free Day First British Car Free day. (A Green Transport Week street party had already been organised in Bath in June 1995.)
24. 1997, U.K. National Car Free Days The ETA steps forward and co-ordinates first three annual CFD's in Britain.
25. 9 September 1997, La Rochelle, France. Journée sans voiture Lead by Mayor Michel Crépeau and Jacques Tallut, La Rochelle organizes France's first real CFD.
26. 21 October, 1997, Paris. Thursday: Car Free Day proposal, presentation made to French Ministry of the Environment. Proposal from the new mobility Consortium made as part of The Common's "Smogbuster" package for fighting car-related pollution and other problems in French cities. (The Ministry later uses this foundation to launch its own "En ville, sans ma voiture?" program one year later.
27. 26 October - 1 November 1997, Lyons, France. First Towards Car Free Cities Conference Organized by International Youth for Action and other. CarBusters program launched.
28. Winter 1997, Amsterdam. Car Free Times Car Free Times publishes Volume 1, Number 1 (with no public support and made freely available).
29. Winter, 1997, Paris. @World Car Free Day Consortium This open NGO site was first established by The Commons as part of their long term New Mobility program on the WWW to support Car Free day organization and expert follow-up in cities all over the world.
30. June 21 1998, Mobil Ohne Auto, Germany-wide Car Free Mobility Day
31. September 22, 1998, "En ville, sans ma voiture?", France. French Ministry of the Environment and 34 French cities organize "En ville, sans ma voiture?" ("A day in the city without my car?).
32. December 1, 1999, Britain. First National ETA Car Free Planning support (UK) Sharing information on planning for European Car Free Day in Britain
33. September 19, 1999, The Netherlands. First National Car Free Sunday in the Netherlands
34. 22 September 1999, First European "Pilot Car Free Day". On Wednesday 22 September 1999, 66 French towns participated in "En ville, sans ma voiture ?", (2nd edition), while in parallel 92 Italian towns organized the first Italian National Car Free Day, "In città senza la mia auto". The Canton of Geneva also participated in what later was later called the first European "Pilot Day", wherein all the participating cities designated Car Free areas in their canters.
35. Sunday 26th of September 1999, First Belgian CFD announced
36. 1 December 1999, UK. Consortium of interested individuals and groups sets up first independent national support group on Web to promote CFD's in Britain (see menu to left for direct link)
37. Sunday, February 6, 2000, Italy Environment Minister Edo Ronchi opens first of 4 successive Car Free Sundays in Italy, to take place on first Sunday of month for next four months.
38. 24 February 2000, Bogotá, Colombia. The Bogotá Challenge The City of Bogotá organizes in cooperation with the World Car Free Day Consortium Sin mi carro en Bogotá, the world's first large scale "Thursday" CFD project, and launches its Bogotá Challenge to the rest of the world.
39. 5 June 2000. The Commons win Stockholm Challenge Environment Prize for outstanding accomplishment in supporting February 2000 Bogota Car Free Day, and invites the Mayor of Bogota to accept the award as a joint prize demonstrating the potential for technology-mediated international collaboration in support of major sustainability projects.
40. 10-18 June 2000, U.K. Green Transport Week, U.K.
41. 24-27 June 2000, Bremen, GermanyCar Free Cities conference in Bremen
42. 21 September 2000. First CarBusters call for a World Car Free Day inviting independent projects to organize on that day, and later announced as a planned annual Open event. (Car Busters asks us to support their project, which we, as always, do.)
43. 22 September 2000. First European Car Free Day The government sponsors reported that 760 European towns jointly organized the first pan-European "In town, without my car!" day.
44. 14 October 2000. Chengdu City of Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China, started the first ever "Car Free Day" of the nation.
45. 29 October 2000. Bogotá holds world's first Car Free Referendum (which passes with flying colors)
46. 1 November 2000. Earth Car Free Day program launched by The Commons and WC/FD Consortium in cooperation with Earth Day Network. Preparations get under way for first ECFD on 19 April 2001.
47. 1 February 2001. Bogota launches first ECFD 2001 project with its second Dia sin Carro.
48. Spring 2001. "Domeniche ecologiche 2001" - Italian Ministry of the Environment organises first Ecological Sundays Car Free program, running on five weekends in
49. 19 April 2001. First Earth Car Free Day. More than 300 hundred groups and cities around the world participate in this first Earth Car Free Day organized by New Mobility WC/FD program and Earth Day Network(the detailed results of which can be accessed here).
50. May-December 2001. Numerous independent Days and demonstrations organized and reported and supported by the World Car/Free Day Consortium of The Commons.
51. September 2001. Second European CFD and second CarBusters World Car Free Day organized.
52. 19 September 2001 Shed Your Car Day - FremantleFirst Australian CFD
53. September 22nd, 2001 Toronto became first Canadian and North American city to officially host a Car Free Day.
54. November 2001. United Nations contacts The Commons and proposes a joint world level project: the United Nations Car Free Days Programme, to be organized as a run-up to the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, demonstrating that this approach is one that can make a difference.
55. 6-8 February 2002. First United National Regional Car Free Days Practicum organized for Latin America, in cooperation with and support of the third Car Free Day in Bogota Colombia. Practicum brings together a delegation of mayors from across the region to observe and exchange information on the CFD approach for their cities. (The Commons participation in all stages is "CO2-free", mediated by the Internet and an expanding array of new communications and distance work technologies. )
56. 8-10 May 2002. Second UN Car Free Day Demonstration and Practicum for Regional Mayors taking place in Fremantle, West Australia.
57. 19 April 2002. First European Mobility Week launched by EC in BrusselsPlanned as annual event in September around their "In town without my car!" program.
58. 2002. World Car Free Network founded, building on the work of CarBusters.
59. 2002. Canadian Car Free Day Network established
60. Sept. 2003 Montreal became the first Canadian city to hold a major downtown, weekday street closure.
61. Sept. 2003 Camden (UK)celebrates first Travelwise Week building on Car Free Days celebrated every year since 2000
62. July 2004. Towards Carfree Cities III, Berlin Organized by World Car Free Network
63. 19 to 24 September 2004. Toronto's first New Mobility Week launches a public enquiry into new less-car packages of policies and measures
64. 22 September 2004 "In town, without my car!", organized by the European Commission and national partners
65. 16 to September 2004 European Mobility Week
66. Etc. etc.

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