TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION
OECD International Conference, Vancouver Canada


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Session 2B - Barriers and Roadblocks

Abstract of address by Eric Britton

Sustainable Transportation as a Dead End: One Barrier Less

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially. - E.B. White

Outline of Presentation:

  1. Sustainable Transportation
    • The experts keep pointing and arguing but...
    • If it’s such a great idea, why isn’t it happening?
    • Why we don’t need to know everything for sure, now!
    • The Sustainable Transport nexus (assemble, improve a bit, adjust, begin again)

  2. People (that's you and me), inertia and the need for breakthrough strategies

  3. Electronics as a substitute/complement to physical movement
    • When resistance is high enough, current doesn’t flow (historic perspectives)
    • Transport/telecommunications trade-offs and the ‘box diagram’
    • Recent experience as a guide
    • Where might it go -- and what might we do to make it go there better and faster
    • Looking out to the (near) future

  4. The "Brains on the knee syndrome" (and why we are not doing better)
    • New ways of ‘building knowledge’ in an information society
    • Convivial transitions to a sustainable society

- The processes that occur in our [societies] are not arcane, capable of being understood only by experts. They can be understood by almost anybody. Many ordinary people already understand this; they simply have not considered that by understanding these ordinary arrangements of cause and effect, we can also direct them, if we want to.
-- Jane Jacobs, in Death and Life of Great American Cities


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