"Of all the kinds of work I can imagine, the hardest work of all is thinking -- and that I guess is why people do so little of it."
Henry Ford, My Philosophy of Industry

Save yourself five hundred dollars . . . and do it yourself

24 August 2007: This page still in process. Have suggestions? Please let us have them.

Save yourselves a quick five hundred dollars and create your own first rate sustainable program yourself. We have already done a lot of the preparatory work for you just in case you decide to take this path. So if you click down the left menu under this heading, or alternatively move over to the New Moblity Agenda home page, you will in truth have a comprehensive package of materials and leads that can serve you well in your venture. You can do it!

A word of caution though: if your goal is (a) to deploy to maximum effect visible short-term on-street improvements in your city and (b) in the process start to move the city and your agency toward a broader and better defined sustainability policy for the mobility sector, you have your work cut out for you. This process is one that is going to take you considerable time and quite a bit of energy, genuine intellectual curiosity, negotiating skill and patience. But it can be done.

Yes if you have got this far here, we would definitely like to encourage you to think about it. After all, the fundamental challenge and raison d'être of the Kyoto World Cities and New Mobility Advisory/Briefs program is not to sell a thousand subscriptions to the Briefs - though it is certainly one of our objectives if we are both to get the message out and not incidentally manage to finance this world wide outreach effort supporting strategic near term actions and policies in our cities. Rather the real underlying reason we are here for is to do what we can to contribute to bring about a new series of attitudes and actions on the vital matters that are being targeted here.

Perhaps the most immediate indication of our underlying priorities has been the decision to make all Briefs freely available to anyone anywhere in the world after the first year of use by the program's sponsors and subscribers. Before making this decision, we discussed it at length with a number of members of our International Advisory Council, who cautiously but unanimously supported this decision.

But there is a second prong of this thrust which is this website itself, which from the beginning has been set up both as an argument for new attitudes and polices in the sector -- and as an instrument for learning about the underlying issues at stake. The first third of the menu to your left is as a result not only a sales pitch for bringing in new subscribers and sponsors, but also provides you with a valuable source of information and insight on the issues at stake. Likewise, we would draw your attention both to the copious materials and leads that you will find in the Kyoto World Cities site (at www.kyotocities.org) and the New Mobility Agenda.-- a general, authoritative (and free) information and learning system about how to move your city toward a more sustainable transportation system, in months and not decades. It's all there.

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Getting started

To get you started in this, we are proposing here a certain number of programs, information sources and links which will permit you to dig in and make the most of this great opportunity and cause. A small word of caution before you get started though, just to be sure that you have accurately understood the dimensions of the tasks at hand.

First cautionary note: As you will see here, the range of lesser known concepts and practices is pretty long. In the Kyoto World Cities site under the heading of "One Thousand Remedial Measures & Tools" we open the agenda by listing more than five hundred, and here under the section for the publication program for future briefs we are already up to about 150 and the work on this is still moving ahead under the impulses of the International Advisory Council. So what this boils down to is that there is quite a lot of terrain that needs to be mastered. First caution!

Second caution: Even as we speak about specific individual measures and policies, it needs to be borne in mind that each in turn requires mastery or at least pretty good competence in the understanding of quite a fair number of underlying issues and specifics that need to be dealt with to make them work. Even in the more modest cases - let's take a Walk to School program assuming that may strike you as a simple enough baseline example-you are going to find that there are several hundred matters of detail that need to be considered and brought into the implementation process, if that single good idea is to be turned into reality in your community. And when we get to something as clearly more complicated as a Congestion Charging program along the lines we are seeing in London and Stockholm, the level of detail that needs to be mastered is orders of magnitude beyond this first threshold.

And the third: Now this is by no means intended to discourage you. But the point we are trying to make here is even at the level of the individual actions this is no simple affair. And while we will come to some suggestions from here as to how you can nonetheless get your arms around these initial changes, there still remains the overarching new planning and policy framework that is going to be needed if these individual actions are to be fully nourished and supported to ensure their maximum impacts on your city. Now, this starts to be more complicated, but nonetheless on the scale of human and social challenges still something that is well within the reach of a committed and able citizen. The kinds of issues and trade-offs that need to be understood at this level are very wide ranging, and move into such areas as the whole debate around sustainable development and social justice, the role of transport and mobility in cities, the health of cities and their citizens, and this long list goes on and on.

The goal of the Briefs is for our team here to take care of as much of the underlying homework and strategy fixing as possible, and this under the eagle eye of the members of the International Advisory Council. But this still leaves a lot of room and supporting materials for those who prefer not to join the program. This section of the site is therefore given over to providing you with as much support as we can organize to get you going on this.

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But before you start

It is worthwhile to bear in mind that each Brief has a triple objective, so it is important to bear in mind that there is rather more to it than just belling the cat on this or that good measure or approach. Take Vol. 1, No. 1 on CarSharing Strategies for Cities by way of example. Yes, it will (a) in its twenty concise pages (and many extensions) provide you with world level knowledge and competence as needed to do the necessary job of making sure that your city's policy is detailed and configured in such a way that your eventual new carshare system is going to get maximum results.

But (b) there is the next perhaps a bit more subtle objective of each Brief which is, through each concrete viable technical example, to probe the boarder policy and action framework of the city, in an attempt to show how it needs to be shaded and expanded in order to best accommodate and ensure the success of this particular measure. To stick with the case of carsharing for example, as the city team begins to review what the city and other agencies can do to ensure this success, they are obliged to consider not only issues of parking and subsidies for this kind of innovative sustainability operation, but also other ways in which the city can get behind this new service. Fashioning the necessary links with other transport providers, educational and communications programs, eventual arrangements and incentives for city employees, outreach programs aimed at local businesses and larger employers, and the long list goes on. The point here is that something as apparently banal and separate in itself as a carsharing operation turns out to have a very elaborate interface of many parts, and by getting control of these the city can get real mileage of such a program.

But (c) there is one more stage of cognition that gets engaged by this process, at least at best. And that is by studying and eventually managing the complex interface of each measure with the rest of the system, the metabolism of the city, you are in the process laying the base for a much broader and more capable sustainable transportation policy for the city overall. Which is what we call the New Moblity Agenda.

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Thinking Exercises