Letter of Invitation to City Leaders

The Politics of Sustainable Transport

The New Mobility Agenda: The Commons
Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France

Tuesday, 14 November 2006

To: The Mayor, City Council, City Manager (and candidates for any of above posts)
Subject: Sustainable Cities/New Mobility Policy Dialogues and Leadership Forum
Event: Accelerated Learning Sessions in Monaco, 29-31 March 2007
cc: Supporting senior staff, local NGOs, consultants, concerned citizens/groups
Dear City Leaders,
Most people may not have grasped this yet, but the simple truth is that we have arrived at a point of major discontinuity in the daily transport arrangements, in our cities and in our lives. Few are more aware of this than you. And it is now time for action.
Look out the window this morning and what do you see -- despite all the work you have done and hard earned taxpayer money you are spending on the sector? Increasing traffic congestion. Lost time. Mounting pollution and public health problems. Accidents. Poorly served groups and areas. Swelling subsidy costs. City centers in duress. And now fears of $100 oil, global warming and suddenly the chilling prospect of energy blackmail. The old system may once have worked, but today it is clearly no longer doing its job. And in case you haven't noticed it, the voters are starting to. Sustainability and sustainable transportation are now emerging as major election issues.

Why New Mobility approaches are needed

Fortunately, not all the news is bad. Quietly a new era is taking shape and has already made sufficient progress so that it can be seen and learned from in the places where it is doing the job -- offering real-world, on-street and in-pocketbook improvements, many of which can be put to work in your city or community. And by contrast with traditional practices, these new approaches can generate visible results within an extremely short period of time -- and at far lower levels of cost: the New Mobility Agenda
What's the difference between the old transport model and the one that is quietly taking its place and that we are reporting on here? Well, the one that is winding down, often with considerable pain, is the hugely costly "all car/no choice" system which has dominated public policy and private practice for more than half a century in most cities around the world. The big problem with the old system is similar to that of any kind of dominant monoculture: it simply lacks the variety and flexibility and hence the resilience and adaptability needed to ensure long-term survival in a changing world.
What is starting to replace the old model in enough places and with enough success to mark the clear dawning of a new era is the New Mobility Agenda, a wide-open, collaborative, international move to a more varied, complex, robust and synergistic transportation polyculture. What is striking about this is that the main driver for this transition lies not in fears of environmental catastrophe or oil shut-down, and not even in our collective good sense or ethics, but rather in the fact that enough successful new practices and models are starting to show results that we now, finally, start to have real choices.

Monaco 2007: Accelerated Learning for City Managers & Decision-makers

The Principality of Monaco, as part of its announced commitment to doing something about the challenges of sustainable development and environmental conservation, has taken the decision to host an annual cycle of cooperative learning and sharing events, the Monaco New Mobility Policy Dialogues, aimed at informing local government about the most promising practices and strategies, the first of which took place in March 2006 on an initial trial basis. The results were sufficiently satisfactory that the Principality has taken the decision to continue its patronage of these annual events, which is taking place this year under the title of Sustainable Cities/New Mobility Policy Dialogues.
This year we are concentrating on three proven, high-impact low-cost approaches in which notable progress has been made of late and on which we are in a position to initiate an accelerated learning process to take place over the three days of intense peer and leadership sessions in Monaco.

Thursday, 29 March: Carsharing Strategies for Cities
Friday, 30 March: Road Pricing/Congestion Charging: Now what?
Saturday, 31 March: Sustainable Cities/New Mobility Leadership Forum

The job of these Accelerated Learning Sessions, as you will see amply in the materials presented in this web site, is to introduce the best of these approaches to you and your support team, one by one and with concise, informed and balanced appraisals for your policy decisions. In a world of almost endless newsletters, websites, reports, Google searches and other sources of purported wisdom and wildly diverse counsel and views, these sessions zero in on what we have learned from experience - from the perspective of what we believe to be the key missing link today: the need for more informed and focused decision making at the level of local government. When it comes to sustainable transportation, there can be no doubt: the city holds the key.
So we now invite you to come to Monaco in the Spring and spend three intensive days of work with some of the leading innovators, thinkers and figures in these fields. And if you are mayor or city leader, we invite you to bring some of your brightest and most young people with you. You and they will see that you have some interesting new choices and that you almost certainly will be able to put some of these good ideas to work in your city. And if you are mayor today and like your job, the odds are that if you do this and get it right you will be mayor tomorrow. This stuff works.
Yours sincerely,
Eric Britton
Chair, The Monaco New Mobility Dialogues
Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities