Sustainable Transport Emergency

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The original STEP project began life in mid 1996 as the "Sustainable Transport Emergency Proposal", a proposal launched for discussion following our participation and active role in organizing the 1996 OECD Conference "Toward Sustainable Transportation" that took place in Vancouver Canada in March of that year. (Click here for the original conference web site). We purposely chose that title in an attempt to impart what we felt was the necessary sense of high urgency to the then-evident environmental and human impacts of our badly out of kilter transport arrangements, particularly in our cities around the world.

At the time the proposal generated some interest and discussions, including at the OECD working group in which we had participated from the beginning. But in the final analysis it failed to take off on its own. (Click here for original STEP proposal and work plan.)

What it did mange to accomplish however was to lay the groundwork for the New Mobility Agenda, which took form in good part as a result of these international discussions and the feedback and ideas they generated. (We invite you to have a look at some of the reactions and really quite interesting thoughts that were communicated to us on this topic at the time. Click here to see them.)

A presentation was subsequently made on this to the OECD in October 1996 under the title "Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret", which can be viewed here. We present this as a polite warning shot for those who may be prepared to ignore the present project.

Recent shifts in attitudes

Now here once again we have a chance to see how we might retrofit this now-old idea to the exigencies and possibilities of the new, high urgency situation which has emerged as a results of a gathering process of experience, views and council from increasingly unimpeachable expert sources from all over the world. Among many noticeable recent events signaling these changes can be cited, roughly in the order that they have occurred.

The gathering media awareness and coverage over the last several years of the climate change issues. <
LI>The progressive weakening of the arguments of those denying the climate change/human intervention process.
Al Gore's fine Inconvenient Truth Film
The Clinton Climate/Large Cities Initiative
The extremely strong opposition of the just-published Fourth Assessment Report of the ICCP (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

So, all this suggests that 2007 is quite possibly very different, and that this idea of a sustainable (transport) emergency may now have a role to play. Let's see.