"How can a man, riding on an ox, looking for
an ox, ever find an ox?"


> > > To turn off audio, click here .

The purpose of this late night muse - it was in fact actually recorded about three o'clock in the morning, when I found myself tossing and turning as I puzzled about the best way to make use of the hour that was being generously handed to me to address this meeting which I was told was going to bring together more than one hundred mayors of towns and cities across China - was to see if I might find some kind of common ground to start to move us to a mutual understanding and point of view about the basic values and tasks to which this conference and my talk are intended to address - that is the challenges of figuring out how to deal with the challenges of the world's fastest-ever process of dynamism and change in the mobility arrangements of their cities across this great country.

I was sure that just about the last thing I should be trying to do would be to give the impression of bringing to you some kind of "important message from the top". And even if I have been observing and providing various forms of counsel and strategic guidelines to city transport projects in many parts of the world over quite a few years, including a lot of very innovative projects and programs, I could think of at least two excellent reasons not to appear to be some kind of evangelical figure from the "wise West".

First, because the truth is that the great majority of our cities, and the policy makers and planners behind them, are doing more than just poorly in the challenges of sustainability and social justice, which at the end of the day are the overall envelope of which our mobility arrangements, important thought they be, are just one part. The transport arrangements of most of our cities, West and East, is just a horrible mess, a mess in terms of their economic impacts, life quality impacts, environmental impacts and even in terms of the basic jobs which they are supposed to get done, i.e., moving people and goods efficiently about in the limited space of the city. So who are we to talk, eh?

And secondly, because what we are seeing in China's cities today is simply way way beyond anything that most of us in the so-called West have ever experienced, even seen, in the past. China 2007 is a whole new ballgame for city and transport planners and policy makers, which suggests that dealing with the challenges is not going to be a matter of papering together some old strategies and policies taken from our past, and handing them over for handy and immediate application by the grateful supplicants.

So perhaps once you have made your way through this five minutes of late night thoughts you find here, hopefully you will be curious enough to turn to the three short videos, which you will see on the menu to your left. Or to which you can click to directly from here. (Note that these videos will play themselves automatically one after the other. But if you prefer to view them full screen, you will have to move manually form one to the other. You will see from the menu how to do that.)

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Last updated on 16 April 2007