• Mission statement
  • Subscriptions & Support
  • Editorial Board
  • Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret
  • Whence the Journal?
  • Future Journal numbers and collaboration

    • Mission statement

    The only practically-oriented journal dealing with the major issues in a field of international concern, World Transport Policy and Practice provides a high-quality medium for original and creative ideas in world transport. Experts in transport, the environment, economics and ecology contribute probing papers dealing in an informed and even-handed manner with key issues in transport, case studies and reports of trials, and assesses the difficulties of balancing economic and ecological considerations as we strive to develop a better transport system in all respects.

    WTPP has a philosophy based on the equal importance of academic rigor and a strong commitment to ideas, policies, and practical initiatives that will bring about a reduction in global dependency on the car, the lorry and aircraft. WTPP has a commitment to sustainable transport which embraces the urgent need to cut global emissions of carbon dioxide, to reduce the amount of new infrastructure of all kinds and to highlight the importance of future generations, the poor, those who live in degraded environments and those deprived of human rights by a planning system that puts a higher importance on economic objectives than on the environment and social justice.

    WTPP embraces a different approach to science and through science to publishing. This view is based on the honest evaluation of the track record of transport planning, engineering and economics. These interrelated disciplines have embraced a quantitative, elitist and mechanistic view of society, space and infrastructure and have eliminated people from the analysis.

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    Subscriptions & Support

    The Journal is published four times a year. It can be downloaded freely by anyone who needs it.

    The Journal is supported by Eco-Logica and EcoPlan, together with subscriptions which are paid on a volunteer basis. The suggested contribution is € 120 per year for libraries, institutions, and consultants, and € 60 for employed individuals. (US Dollar equivalents fo the above will do as well if that is more convenient for you.) With the help of these contriubtions the Journal is thus made available at no cost for students and groups in the developing countries. (Please let us know if we can identify you in these pages as a supporting subscriber.)

    Orders and payments by check, to be sent to

    Eco-Logica Ltd.
    53 Derwent Road
    Lancaster, LA1 3ES. U.K.
    ISSN 1352-7614

    Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret

    (If you have RealMedia installed, you can click the above title for an audio file introducing this presentation. To get the free RealMedia plug-in, click here. )
    Check out the leading edge of the research, the many related Web sites and all the conferences on global warming, carbon dioxide build-up, ozone depletion, and the rest, and one comes to a pretty simple, pretty solid conclusion. From an eco-perspective we are misbehaving very badly indeed -- and what is worse is that, rhetoric aside, there is little out there on the screen that promises much better. Indeed the numbers all suggest that things are going from bad to worse. Emissions targets are being timidly set, after a huge amount of hemming and hawing. And then flagrantly missed.

    That, in our words, is Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret, and it does appear to be not just a transient anomaly but rather a sign of our times, of our generation, of our (un)willingness to organize ourselves and get around to doing (a lot) better. (For more on this you might usefully begin by turning to the OECD's program on Environmentally Sustainable Transport at http://www.oecd.org/env/trans/. You may also find some interest in a presentation made to the program in October 1997 on the topic of Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret, which is available here in our Library as a PowerPoint presentation. (Note that it is a very large zipped file (ca. 3 Mo.) and requires a sound card if you wish to hear the sound track.)

    This is but one of the issues to which World Transport is giving its attention. If these matters interest you, why don't you begin by having a look at the Archives here to see what we have done in the past, and at the Future Issues section for our plans for the next three years. Who knows? Those plans might in time include you.

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    Whence the Journal?

    As we roll up the first polluting kilometers of this new century, and after half a decade of experience with our Journal now behind us, we are asking ourselves a certain number of questions about the future. In these first years we have somehow been able to keep our production schedules and get out some pretty interesting numbers, some of which had elicited a rather enthusiastic public response. But it is, we are not afraid to say, a rather difficult row to hoe.

    We have tried to do this without the usual supporting institutional structures, which may have been a mistake, though it has had for us the great advantage of leaving all aspects of editorial and production policy to us without any influence from commercial or other interests. On the downside since we lack the usual marketing resources, this has made it among other things somewhat difficult to get the level of subscription support that is needed to guarantee the journal's survival.

    One of the avenues that we are exploring as a probe of the future, as you can see here, is that of morphing into either a purely electronic journal. Or, better yet we think, some combination of the two. We are not the only ones in this situation of course as we enter into this post-Gutenberg are. And though it is cold comfort we find it interesting to see that a reference as venerable and as indisputably valuable as the Encyclopedia Britannica are asking themselves many of these same questions, and are, as we, experimenting with the electronic/print mix in an attempt to find a way into the future. Their problem is also our problem, though some might note an eventual scale difference

    Do you have any thoughts for us on this? One very helpful thing for starters would be if you would take the time to see if any of the institutions that you work with or know with a mandate in this area might be interested to support us as Contributing Subscribers. As part of our policy, we have made an effort to keep even these subscriptions affordable by the usual standards, which means of course that we need to have several hundred institutional subscribers just to help cover bare production costs.

    If you do have anything to share with us on this, we would like to offer you as well as the usual private communications the possibility of going on line with a letter to the group as a whole. We are quite sure that the final solution that we find to this dilemma will be the result of a group process and useful feedback from people like you.

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    Updated 20 April 2000