The Greening of Transport in Cities:
2008 - 2012
  • Introductory note
  • The million tailpipe problem
  • Some first references

    Brainstorm presentations
    1. The Old Mobility Impasse
    2. What is New Mobility?
    3. The winds of change
    4. The Greening of Paris
    5. What about your city?


    Advisory Briefs (Paris)
    1. Vélib' City Bikes
    2.Mobilien BRT
    3. Carsharing strategies
    4. Carte Orange
    5. Car control strategies

    Your comments here
  • Comment direct here
  • Comment to group



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    Welcome to our open brainstorm

    Paris. 12 October 2007

    Dear World-Wide Colleagues,

    Welcome to our "open group brainstorm": a rough working assembly of materials, ideas, references and images we have pulled together over the last months as a contribution to (and with the help of) colleagues around the world who are hard at work on the challenges of, no less than, "Revinventing transport in cities". It builds on a continuing research and advisory program (The New Mobility Agenda, since 1988), and more recently a series of presentations, workshops and meetings over July and August of this year with a wide range of concerned people and groups in Stuttgart, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Santa Barbara and now back in Paris. The presentations you find here have also benefited from critical reviews and commentaries by world wide colleagues in the New Mobility Idea Factory (see above menu), most of which have been incorporated into the materials as they now stand.

    The five current presentations are currently available here both in PDF and PowerPoint versions which we invite you to use and adapt for your own needs. They are intended to support a cycle of group discussions, starting with a general introduction to the "old mobility impasse" and then moving beyond that in discrete steps, passing through a quick intro to the latest cycle of projects here in Paris and ending with a number of points, questions and suggestions about how one can work on this base to create a new mobility profile for your city. You will see how they work if you spend a few minutes with them in the following order:

    • 1. The Old Mobility Impasse
      This opening presentation attempts to pull together in a dozen slides a summary view of why we need to change, to reinvent even, our policy and delivery models of transport in cities. A more complete treatment of these various points will be found in the extensive section of the site entitled, "The Old Mobility Impasse".

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    • 2. Climate: The winds of change
      This component summarizes the important role that the climate change issues are taking in influencing the transportation policy debates more broadly. As will be seen, it is our position that the high visibility of the climate change issues and debate only serve to point up further the need for reinventing transport in cities. It points up the importance of working with the main groups and programs behind the climate issues, including the Clinton Climate Initiative, the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, and others.

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    • 3. What is New Mobility?
      How does it work, and what do we need to do now to create these new patterns in our cites? Once again you will find far more extensive materials and backup in the section of this site entitled The New Mobility Strategy, which in turn provides existing materials and references and links to leading sources on information and insight on these matters world-wide.

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    • 4. The Greening of Transport in Paris
      This section provides by way of leading example a quick overview of how one city is undertaking to reinvent transport for its citizens and visitors, and in the process providing a defining example for other cities seeking to do the same. The treatment isolates five specific on-going innovations, that the city is combining to create the underpinnings of a new model. Paris is not the only example of a city which is in the process of breaking the mould and the old limitations and shortcomings, but it gives the reader a fine starting place, which you can then fill out and extend for yourself through the good references provides here showing how this is going on in other leading cities around the world --and most of which, incidentally, are in Europe. So far.

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    • 5. Now, what about your city?
      This closing section of the brainstorm represents our best attempt to step back from the wealth of materials you will find on this subject here and in other leading sources, and provide a reasonably brief summary of how in our view cites, your city we would like to think can start the wheels turning on this new process.

    We put these before you at this point as an open set of raw materials and tools intended for handy browsing, collegial exchanges, questioning, discussions, and eventual future presentations, including maybe by you. Long as it may be in this form, it shows just the tip of the very large iceberg of the considerable changes in thinking, policy and actual practices which are at work today shaping the transport sector of leading-edge cities around the world. But that of course you know.

    Need more? A good starting place is the References section (including two sets of rather striking short videos illustrating some of the problems and solutions our cities face in all this.) Beyond that you may find some help in the New Mobility Climate Emergency Program site at http://climate.newmobility.org and from the Cities for Mobility site at http://www.cities-for-mobility.org. (All references are directly clickable if you are looking at this in PowerPoint and are connected to the net.)

    For the Paris section most of the references are in French; in case you cannot read them easily, I would point you to http://translate.google.com/ where you can copy the URL into the address slot, to get basic working translations in German and English. The machine translations are far from perfect, but if you are genuinely interested to know they offer you a great start.

    The title page calls this an 'invitation to an open brainstorm' because I intend it as just that. So if you do have comments, corrections, challenges, or leads for how to make this better, please do get in touch. I would really be very pleased to hear from you and can use them for future editions. My coordinates: E: eric.britton@newmobility.org, T: +331 4326 1323. Skype: ericbritton

    Kind thanks, and I very much hope you have some fun with this. And soie practical value for your city and the important decisions which lie before you.

    Eric Britton

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    Some handy references

    Just below you will find some of the references to which we referred the some two hundred participants who came to Stuttgart from more than thirty counties on all continents. For more, we can refer you to the New Mobility Agenda references that you will find in the main menu of this site.

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