Start Here - Kyoto Cities

*^ ^ ^ The top menu you see here is your quick update* guide. ^ ^ ^**
It also works quite nicely as a sort of Executive Summary. If you work your way across it from left to right, you will in effect cover the main highpoints of the site and latest developments of the program.

Start Here-->

This international collaborative project addresses a single question:

"What can you do in your city to reduce traffic and its negative impacts dramatically (say on the order of 20%) in a very short period (we propose 20 months), and within your existing transportation budget."

That's it. The entire thrust of this collaborative international effort is to provoke you to ask yourselves this one question. And, if we can, to help you in your search for answers, examples, references and solution paths. Nothing else!

To help advance this aggressive initiative, the Kyoto World Cities 20/20

project team is building up an open platform of expert guidance and high level international peer support mediated by the internet, placed at the service of groups and cities anywhere in the world wishing to take on this challenge - and in the process move their mobility systems sharply in the direction of higher efficiency, lower costs, and greater sustainability.

A 20% reduction in traffic and CO2 in your city 20 months. That's it! All the rest -- global warming right or wrong, long term programs, scenarios, big costly infrastructure projects, the promise of new technologies in the years ahead, etc. etc. -- all that we leave to our excellent colleagues and programs world-wide. To get a detailed idea of who they are and what they are targeting for their contributions to the challenges, we invite you to check out the World-Wide Sustainability Resource Inventory right here.

Kyoto . . . and "Beyond Kyoto"

Despite the fact that the transport sector is responsible for at least half, often more, of all CO2 production in most cities of the world, there is no provision under the Kyoto Protocols to provide guidelines, mechanisms or incentives to attack these problems. Much less to mandate them.

But at the same time it is important to bear in mind that "Kyoto Compliance" per se is far from the highest priority problem for government and people in most cities in the world -- not least because their transportation systems are being threatened in far more immediate and for them more drastic ways. That said, any proposal such as you will find in these pages turns out to have every bit as much validity and usefulness in these cities as well.

Anything combination of measures and policies that can undertake reduce CO2 - if that happens to be the target you chose - by twenty percent in something like twenty months is going to have enormous impacts on traffic, quality of life, the economcy, and performance of the city's transportation system overall. And that indeed is that this program is all about.

The Kyoto World Cities Challenge aims squarely at both these serious gaps. The program has been shaped over 2004 through the collegial efforts of an informal international working group in cooperation with the Paris-based NGO The New Mobility Agenda. As a first step in a targeted two year remedial process it was decided to set up, starting with this website, a free, independent, internet-mediated world-wide platform of useful documentation, expert guidance and peer support for cities and groups to address the problems that have the highsest priority for them.

Main building blocks of the program

The main building blocks of this independent peer initiative include:

This website: An interactive, highly linked, multi-level website, with extensive information and interactive communications tools built in.

The 20/20 Action Plan: An aggressive Outline Program Proposal and Strategy for practical, high impact, short term, explicitly targeted remedial action at the level of your city starting in 2005, supported by ...

International Advisory Council: A distinguished International Advisory Council: a high level group of recognized experts and leaders in the wide range of fields that need to be brought in to the solution process.

Working Partnerships and Alliances: The international, regional and city partners who in the final analysis are the people and groups who are going to translate all this into palpable on-street, in-lung reality.

World Resource Inventory: Direct contact and continuing exchanges with a World Wide Inventory of Programs and Sources active in related areas with coverage and competences as needed to meet the challenges.

The Bridge A state-of-the-art multi-level Information and IP Communications Platform bringing together low cost high quality internet tools that can be used to knit the Panel, the resources, the network more generally, and the interested cities together.

Discussion, Feedback, Comments A rich process of comments, observations, ideas and proposals from the Panel and others interested in advancing this agenda.

The Kyoto Cities Challenge is above all a thinking exercise.

"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

The Kyoto Cities Challenge is not the Eleventh Commandment. It does not offer a magic wand solution for sustainable mobility and public and economic health for your city. It is, above all, a thinking exercise (ouch!) which is intended to stretch your mind and challenge your imagination and leadership skills.

The basic idea is thus to put before anyone who is open to this way of thinking a broad array of concepts and implementation strategies drawn from leading edge projects around the world, some of which not all that well known, and which are not put before you not so much as a guaranteed recipe for success as a unique package-- but rather as a grain of sand and challenge to your imagination and commitment to the community on the one hand, and on the other your ability to harness the technical and leadership skills needed to make a big step toward more sustainable transportation in your city in a very tight time frame.

At the end of the day it is what you do with all this and the ways in which you combine various parts of it with the best things that are already going on in your city that will make the difference. Indeed if your city is lucky as you review your own ongoing and planned projects, measures and programs you will see that many of these ideas set out here are already underway or at the very least being looked at closely. But what the 20/20 project adds to this, is its very tight time focus, high profile, and its potential for providing a clearly understandable overall structure for bringing the best of your projects and efforts into high relief.

The Special Relationship - The New Mobility Agenda

Kyoto Cities is part of a greater whole: a long term international collaborative effort that we call The New Mobility Agenda. The Agenda first launched in 1988 as a broad-based collegial internet platform for critical discussion, exchanges of materials, and diverse forms of knowledge building and cross-border collaboration on the challenging, necessarily conflicted topic of "sustainable transportation and social justice". We call it: A Factory of Ideas for Sustainable Transportation.

There is a useful synergistic relationship between the two e-Fora that you may wish to exploit: with Kyoto Working Groups Forum here specifically serving the purposely narrow focus of the 20/20 program; and the New Moblity Cafe the place for the much broader discussions and exchanges on the subject of the move to more sustainable mobility in our cities. Both fora are best accessed through the Working Groups links in the left menu.

Note to the first time visitor

What you find here is a living, interactive web site and program aimed at a seven years challenge (2005 through 2012 and the day of final reckoning on the Kyoto targets). The site and the tool set behind it are being created and refined as a result of an extensive interactive group process, and given the dynamics of the challenge before us it is fair to assume it will always be work in progress over the seven years of its planned life.

If today you encounter some incomplete sections, ideas or tools that may stutter now and then, that's because we're still working on it. Don't forget: more than four billion people are living in cities, and in more than one hundred thousand of them their present transportation arrangements constitute a major menace to public health, quality of life and the local economy. So there is plenty of work for all of us who care. If that includes you, we invite you to keep reading.

The key to easy access lies in the two menus: top and left which are always available to you. The top menu is intended to serve the frequent user by providing one-click access to the key building blocks and areas in which more progress is going on. The left menu is more complete, and probably the best place to start your first time here. The basic layout is of course explained in the Site Map here.

Now on to more on making this work. - - - - - >