Transforming actions, events, measures, policies, targets, you may want to think about for your city
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A first guide to the wide range of tools and measures available to cities which by and large have not been in the traditional toolkit of transport planners and city authorities. While many of these measures have made considerable progress and had substantial impacts in various places around the world, overall they have to be considered grossly under-exploited resources.
Please note that the following are placed here at this point by way of first quick ideas and leads, to give you a feel for the range and variety of our topic. They are not recommendations (at least not in this formd and at this point); nor are they comprehensive. They are put before you at this point just first food for thought and initial identifying information.
About half of the entries listed here link to a source which is intended not to be definitive in any way but rather to give you a bit more background where the measure may be unfamiliar.
This list is itself a valuable information tool and spur to broader thinking -- and if you can help extend or improve it, get in touch with us with your corrections, suggestions and references. We answer out mail.
Note: Some of these entries will pop up in another window. You'll see.
Please note also: The publication schedule after the first two numbers will be determined by the feedback and counsel we receive from our subscribers, and from the members of our Advisory Council. So please do make you voice heard.
Also, we invite you to add to this list, which is intended also to work as a constant reminder of approaches which many mayors, city managers and local leaders need to hear more, and more succinctly, about.
Revisiting the measures
In the hope of rendering this very long list which includes a fair number of topics which may not be immediately familiar to the reader, we have below reorganized the master list into three main categories, which together constitute the main pillars of the New Mobility strategy: (a) Measures aiming to modify the existing road and parking infrastructure to render it more sustainable; (b) measures aimed to increase the supply and quality of means of alternative (to SOVs in traffic) mobility; (c) and a more general list of goals, strategies, tools and events. These are, incidentally, the three pillars of the New Mobility Agenda.
Rationalize the existing automotive infrastructure
Increase supply of alternative (to SOVs in traffic) mobility
C. Strategies, Tools, Goals, Events
It is not of course that these topics and approaches are altogether unknown. To the contrary, for proof all you have to do is crank up your browser and Google it. But what you get there is not the solution but really just an advanced variant of the problem from your perspective as a mayor or busy planner. An overwhelming plethora of information, often contradictory and of wildly varying quality -- "the fog of the internet."
How to sort through all this and figure out what is going to make sense for your city> Well, that is precisely the job of the Briefs. Accurate decision information, based on direct contact and knowledge of the best examples and main actors involved in each case. All put at your fingertips in twenty authoritative pages.
Here is an in-process listing of some of the considerable range of topics and approaches being targeted for coverage in the Briefs. You will note that most are not at all hermetic; meaning that they often spill over into each other's territories in many ways. But that's precisely what the New Mobility Agenda is all about: creating and maintaining dynamic "portfolios" or bouquets of diverse, multi-level, niche-oriented, high performance, synergetic "less-car" alternatives to getting what you need and in style. Definitely not monoculture.
Bear in mind, that the term "new mobility" is a strategy that combines both supply and demand management. (The New Mobility Agenda is sometimes called the "other half" or the "1, 2, 3" of Sustainable Transportation.) It also brings up for consideration tools and strategies for the minimization of actual physical movements by any of a number of means, including things as wide ranging as activity clustering, better land use planning, location strategies and zoning, electronic communications to substitute or draw down physical travel, and travel minimization by any of numerous means - and all that against the background of restructuring tax and incentive systems which currently all too often are working in the wrong direction The full list, as suggested below, is a long one. Fortunately for our city and for our planet.
While a quick visit via Google will in almost all cases turn up references for each of these, references of some sort and in cases very long lists indeed, we have decided to provide here a bit of one-click first orientation for some of the following measures and tools for readers who may not quite recognize a given term. Please note that these first references come from a variety of very different sources, including on-going work under the New Mobility Agenda and that of a number of collaborating groups and colleagues supporting this program, as well as contributions that we, they and others are making to the Wikipedia (which until we all showed up was remarkably incomplete in these areas). In some cases, thinking that at least a first lead, no matter how rough or idiosyncratic, might help in giving at least a first ghost of an idea of what this item is about, we simply took what we could lay our hands on at the moment. That said, please understand that these references are not proposed at this point as definitive but rather as just food for thought: first starting places only intended to help the reader get a first feel for the approach or tool.
Moreover, we would ask you to bear in mind that the main task of the Briefs is not simply to introduce, describe and update you on the potential and hard realities of those approaches which we consider to be most topical and worthy of your interest -- but more to the point, our main task is to provide you with leads and guidelines for policy and planning from the vantage of the city. This indeed is the key to this project.
Note: Just because a given measure, tool or target is listed here should not be taken as a recommendation for your city or indeed any other -- and certainly not as an unqualified recommendation. (A couple of these are pretty whacky from a city management perspective, but often behind them as some important considerations of which it pays not to lose sight.) A city, a city's mobility system, is a delicate metabolism, and before starting to mess around with some new and possibly appealing idea, it is essential that both context and the measure be carefully analyzed and adapted in a mature and professional way. The cost of error is far too high to permit hasty or idealistic choices. Thus, don't be fooled: getting a New Mobility Strategy right is real hard work.
Note - Wikipedia entries: This remarkable new open reference source is, as far as its mobility related entries are concerned, still very much work in process. And we here are working to ensure that in due course it is a comprehensive and accurate source of first-step information and leads for the new mobility concepts which we consider to be vital to the economic health and well being of our cities all over the world. You are cordially invited to join this process, and for the lead on how to get started kindly click here.
Topics and coverage of future Briefs
Let's look at them again, but this time from a slightly different angle
The fog of the internet
More on the measures and how this is intended to work
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Last updated on 4 September 2007