Program Highlights & Challenge

On 16 February 2005, after the better part of a decade of very hard work on many sides, the Kyoto Treaty finally entered into effect and with it the obligation of some 140 nations on this beleaguered planet to do something about their emissions. For the advanced industrial economies, the 1990 targets are going to be very hard to meet: but at least there is now a process in place which is starting to point the way. In some parts of the economy.

However when it comes to transport in cities, there can be no grounds for optimism. To the contrary, despite the many useful point improvements made by the leading edge cities in recent years, the trend overall is harshly moving in the wrong direction: in each we are seeing year after year more traffic, more pollution, more accidents, more lost time, more unnecessary deficits, and more urban amenity and quality of life washed away by our aimless short-sighted policies.

But sustainable transportation should not wait. It is not a luxury. And it is not something that we can afford to fob off to tomorrow. The cost of the inefficiencies of today's dysfunctional transportation arrangements in environmental, life quality and economic terms has already outstripped the carrying capacity of many cities and the planet as a whole.

The Kyoto Cities Challenge in brief:

The Challenge goals are exceptionally ambitious -- as indeed they must be under the circumstances. It not only invites each participating city to set exceptionally tough performance targets for itself to move toward "Kyoto Compliance". But also to achieve notable progress toward this in terms of a very tight target timetable of two years. (This particular time horizon is chosen in part because it means that results will be achieved, or not, within the period of most local elected official's mandates.)

One variant receiving especially close attention within the group is the 20/20 Challenge. The goal is to create a high profile city-wide action program to achieve some form of 20% reduction in a target period of 20 months. The question comes up of course "20% of what". And this is something that needs to be sorted out by the planning teams in each city. Thus one city might target a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions, another of some indicator of motorized traffic, a third perhaps some public health metric such as pulmonary infections. But in each case these need to be set carefully during the intense three month blueprint stage.

The international expert group is confident that this challenge can be met, but is well aware that this is going to require exceptionally strong local leadership, considerable technical virtuosity and a broad base of public support if it is to work The cooperating experts are confident that once a first group of pioneer cities show the way, this approach will capture the attention of many others and spread like wildfire. What is needed now is that first set of high visibility, high impact city programs. The rest will follow.

The immediate reaction of most people to this is that it is simply not possible. "Far too ambitious" they say. And "not enough time". Fair enough, but after extensive discussions in our international expert networks with leading edge hands-on experience in these matters in a wide range of urban contexts, we have together concluded that not only is something on this order of magnitude necessary, but that it is also possible. However it is certainly not a "business as usual" or "dog in the manger" attitude that is going to make this work. Such significant improvements as needed to start to move our cities toward Kyoto Compliance are only going to be achievable if the desire, leadership and competence are there to make it work.

What we are hoping to do once we get the ball rolling is to create a climate of progress, information and networking, in which the first courageous pioneer cities share their results and expertise in a lively, cost-effective, direct manner as they move ahead. The program however is ready to start from the beginning (which is where we are now), so it will be the task of bringing in these first cities that, along with the necessary supporting technical development work, occupy our full attention in the months immediately ahead.

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The Problem Set

The most effective way of understanding the full extent of the dysfunctionality and costs of our current transportation arrangements is to view it as a broad based 'public health' problem -- to our minds more useful and powerful than looking at it as one more transportation or even environment challenge. Once we dimension the extent of the crisis and the many areas of society and our daily lives that are being undermined by our present inaction, we have taken an important first step in the right direction.( Click here to get a feel for how this works.)

The truth is that only a major systemic change will do the job. And once you are talking about that you suddenly find yourself confronted with the challenges of paradigm shifts, cultural changes, human and institutional inertia, and all those myriad justifications and explanations which are invariably ticked off one by one to justify just sitting back and hoping that things do not get too much worse within our time.

But wait! We are making the transition to something a lot better much harder than we have to. At the leading edge of the field of transport policy and practice we have learned a large number of important things over these last several decades. We thus have the raw materials for our solution. Let's see what we can do to put them to work.

The leading edge of the profession now know that a city can, if it decides to, make significant near term inroads in congestion, pollution and life quality on its streets, without waiting for more international treaties to be signed, new technologies to appear from heaven, draconian anti-car policies from 'eco-terrorists', or leveraging large piles of hard-earned taxpayer money to build yet more new roads, elaborate intersections, metros, LRTs or continue to dumbly fund costly, deficitory public transportation operations that invariably end up either half empty or stuck in traffic.

Sustainable mobility at the level of a city or region - which is what this is all about - can be achieved in far less time than probably you ever thought. The means for achieving these ambitious objectives key on a (a) targeted, (b) aggressive, (c) locally-driven, (d) coordinated, (e) now-oriented (f) pattern-break commitment on the part of local leadership and all concerned with the transport sector and its extensions and their impact on your city.

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Solution Elements

Here are the basic raw materials of the approach:

1. Clarify and dimension the crisis, city by city.
2. Develop action plans that promise visible short term results
3. Placing all this firmly in a long term strategic framework that is going to move us, move our cities toward the underlying goals of sustainable development and social justice.

The core of the problem - and which by the way, once we understand it also gives us a significant leg up on the necessary solution path -- is that our present transportation arrangements are above all not "space efficient". We are thus suffering in many ways are above all a problem of incompatible geometry: i.e., far too little mobility throughput in a grossly over-sized, egregiously underutilized and unnecessarily costly infrastructure that could indeed be restructured to give everybody concerned a lot more bang per buck if we follow this to create a process which achieves major reductions in traffic, we will also start to clear the air and get our cities moving toward Kyoto Compliance.

To sum up the core of this concept in a few quick lines for now. The central idea is to create a high visibility public action program which will undertake under intense public scrutiny to achieve major reductions in traffic and associated air pollution in the target city in a very short, highly focused period. Our experience and discussions with our international networks thus far suggest that in a city with strong leadership and good technical competence on both the planning and implementation ends, it may be possible to achieve a 20% reduction in a 20 month period. For this reason we call this a 20/20 Challenge.

What is useful about this concept is that it is at once short-term, results-oriented, far-reaching, affordable and realistic. No less important, it targets highly ambitious near term efficiency and visible environmental improvements without requiring massive injections of hard earned taxpayer money. It also, with the right kind of preparatory work and support, can offer a very powerful political tool for mayors and city counsels who want to offer a better, safer, cleaner and more affordable city to their electorate.

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High Points

The solution starts with you: And here is the irony of this program and approach. It is that the only way that this job is going to be done is if you personally get involved. This challenge is being addressed world wide and should within days arrive on the screens and desks of a very large number of those in this world who know most about these issues and the way ahead. These pages will serve to provide you with some first orientation on all this; but above all it is your experience, your professionalism, and your commitment to sustainable development that are going to move this agenda ahead.

Find a city and a team: Once you have decided to get involved, among the very first steps will be for you to go through your network to locate a city or a group with whom you can work to get this program moving in some specific place. It will not be every mayor or city council that are going to have the vision, courage and sheer ability to make this work in their community. But there are a number of them out there and it is up to us to find the ones that are going to understand what this is all about, and who will be willing to lead the way.

Set a target ("People manage what they measure"): Careful preparation of a highest-priority, broad-based, multi-level, phased, city-wide, collaborative action program that sets out to achieve (a) an explicitly targeted and strikingly high (we suggest that you look at what is needed to achieve a 20% reduction) area-wide reduction in traffic and associated public health impacts (CO2, accidents, etc.) in the city (b) within a specified and brief target period (again, we suggest that you start by looking at a 20 month target period).

List of available measures is in fact very long (click here for more on this), but the crux of the approach lies above all in the systematic, perhaps even stealthy, integrated shift of a relatively modest portion of the total available road infrastructure to both old (i.e., public transport) and new "high space efficiency" movers.

1. New strategies for HOV and exclusive or limited access lanes
2. Cycle and walking access
3. Carpooling and other kinds of vehicle pools
4. Carsharing
5. Strategic parking measures
6. Telework and tele-quite a few other things as well
7. Efficient goods movement
8. Better information systems
9. Driver training
10. More strategic and more effective enforcement techniques
11. New shared transport services (including emphasis on new technology communications interfaces such as mobile phones, SMS, the net, etc. with both traditional and new purveyors of group or shared transportation)
12. Better integration of land use
13. New economic and financial incentives to favor sustainable transport
14. Low cost public space projects to support new uses and patterns
15. And eventually, though this takes time to get right, congestion charging.

Ensuring success: There is a prudent process by which the 20/20 program's ambitious aims can be checked for consistency and do-ability, and which lends itself, indeed depends on, very specific local tailoring and participation. But any eventual remedial action program along these lines that is going to yield results has to be accompanied ("sold") by a clear target and process that the voters and public can understand, want to work toward, and which they are confident will yield visible near-term results.

Car-like mobility as a target We very much doubt that citizens in 21st century democracies are going to support in most places degraded levels of access as a result of such a program, no matter how noble its goals. For better or worse, people have come to look for car-like mobility as the best way to get around. But that is not the end of the story: it is just the beginning. The goal of a 20/20 project is precisely to combine services, measure, and innovations so that most people are now going to have ways of getting there faster, cheaper and safer than under the old car-based system which has entailed longer times of being stuck in traffic with each year that passes. We are a smart society and we have a huge number of tools at our disposal for doing better. So now under the whip of Kyoto we have the chance to put them to work. Let's not miss this golden opportunity.

Massive new investments? Does this imply 20% new money on top of everything? No! But it does require rethinking, redeploying and repackaging. And yes, a certain number of new synergistic initiatives as well, including some which perhaps you have not yet considered.

Everything new? Is this to suggest that the entire content of the 20/20 program must be new? Not at all. It is recognized that in many cities there are already projects and programs that are moving in this direction, or at least many elements of it. However the contribution of the 20/20 program is that it provides a broader underlying structure, higher visibility and a sense of urgency and support which has thus far been lacking.

Planning and preparation: The planning period to develop a 20/20 program blueprint? Well, we propose a two week advance planning mission leading into an intensive focused three month effort, but only if there is major backing by and commitment of local government and the volunteer sector. Half-hearted support will just not work. Also requires considerable technical expertise on the part of transport planners and energetic entrepreneurship from both public and private sector actors in the city, to allow us to use their expanding toolkit to better understand and provide for the impact on the streets of the many changes that together constitute the New Mobility Agenda for the city.

And the Long Term? This is not to say that there is no place for long term thinking and action in the New Mobility Agenda, but rather the level of urgency of the problems in most places requires immediate remedial actions. Thus, all longer term programs and thrust must be supported by aggressive and broadly supported near term actions, for which the scope is in fact very large. (Which by the way should not do you a great deal of harm if you happen to be mayor or councilman with an election in the wings).

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Reinventing the wheel?

As we speak to many people in cities and in groups and programs already working in this area, we often find that they don't give the impression of much liking this concept. Their firmly expressed view is that they are already working on it, the challenges are already difficult enough -- and that there is no reason why yet one more program should come in to draw attention and resources away from what is already going on. Moreover, they have little hesitation in criticizing the level of ambition of the 203 program. We have deep sympathy with this attitude and would like to address it here at the start.

Indeed, there is a great deal already going on both at the level of many cites and many national, regional and international programs. Many of them are extremely good at what they do. But . . .

However we see them as important parts of the solution, and feel that for our part our contribution as a world network is to do what we can to (a) step up the level of ambition of all on-going and new programs to bring them more in line with the as yet unmet challenges of Kyoto; (b) ratchet down the time frame to that very short twenty months (a period of time that any mayor or elected official can understand better than many who look at all this from outside); (c) in each case help create the kind of broader, more strategic, higher priority envelope in the city, which can help support and enhance the best of what is already going on there; and (d) be ready to bring in additional expertise and perhaps even eventually resources to bear.

However in all cases the real work, the real contribution will be to all those people, groups, and programs that are already there and working hard, each in their own assigned target areas.

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What can you do to make this work?

If you are one of our informed international colleagues or someone who knows these issues and the problems behind them, you can quite possibly do a great deal. And while you will of course have your own ideas on all this, here is a very short list to get you going:

• Associate your group, program with this cause: Let the world know that you think these issues of transport in cities require high visibility and priority attention. Add you name and link to our listing here.

• Comment on draft materials & program: Intensive group discussions and exchanges are going to be a big help in firming up this program, and in setting the stage for the specific pioneering city projects that now need to follow. You will find here some good ways of doing this.

• Pass on the message: Please pass on this letter and related materials to your colleagues, contacts and discussion groups working in these areas. We are going to need to get the news out to many thousands of our colleagues and connections world wide if this is to gain the necessary momentum and support.

• Identify cities, allies: You may already have some ideas about next steps, cities, projects, allies -- and we very much hope that you will share these with the groups, since any specific initiatives that you might take will serve to encourage others to get actively involved on their side.

• Get the media involved: And let the print and electronic media know as well about what we are trying to do and where to come for more. High international visibility is part of the toolkit we need to put in place to make this work.
  Click here for current Media Release.