Program Organization
  • The Agenda
  • Accelerated Learning
  • Advisory/ Briefs
  • Gender & Transport Forum
  • Global South Mobility
  • Journal of World Transport
  • Kyoto World Cities
  • Lots Less Cars
  • New Mobility Kids Network
  • Value Capture/Tax reform
  • World Car Share
  • xTransit
  • "Backdrop" Programs

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    • "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them."
    -- Albert Einstein

    The Agenda is organized into a steadily evolving constellation of semi-self-contained, informal international partnership projects, each of which can be usefully consulted either on its own or in parallel with the more general flow of information and materials that are being developed within this New Mobility Agenda site itself. More than a dozen collaborative programs have thus far been developed as you will see just below, or under Programs on the main left menu. If you have ideas for yet other concepts that can make good use of this approach, this is the place to turn with your suggestions.

    Building Blocks of the New Mobility Agenda
    1. The New Mobility Agenda
      Unconstrained by bureaucracy, economic interests or schedules, New Mobility was launched under The Commons in 1988 as an open international platform for critical discussion, exchanges of materials and views, and diverse forms of cross-border collaboration on the challenging, necessarily conflicted topic of "sustainable transportation and social justice". It is an example of what we call a Self-Organizing Collaborative Network, within which our role is simply to provide the platform for the open group discussions and creative interactions. The Agenda looks at policy, practice and leading edge developments and new tools that are shaping the sector. All with an insistent horizon on the importance of creating new patters of behavior and performance in a one to five year time horizon, maximum. On the grounds that these new ways of doing things are going to help us better understand what we can achieve in the longer run.

      • The Idea Factory of the New Mobility Agenda t offers a free, public, flexible discussion space for those who feel that our transport systems need to be, and can be made to be, more sustainable and more just -- and who wish to freely exchange ideas and information about it. This talking parlor for the strategic discussion of transport-related issues. It is (with the odd wild exception) sober, balanced and professional. The mail address for posting is NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com To join the group, an email to NewMobilityCafe-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

      • The New Mobility ThinkPad is a collaborative blog which posts thinkpieces and articles which challenge "old mobility" thinking and highlight promising projects and developments. The ThinkPad is adding a new dimension of communications and exchange to our international collaboration and work. It offers a higher degree of exposure of ideas (see it in Google) than the Idea Factory, which is basically an internal work pad. Check it out. Check it out. Contribute. It's yours!

      • The New Mobility/Wikipedia interface offers via the Wikipedia an open encyclopedia which we have undertaken to stock with accurate and up to date entries defining several dozen key new mobility and sustainable transport concepts, modes and activities. Because even though the concept has been around for more than a decade, it is still not very well known nor understood. We would thus like to invite you to help provide a clear public statement of what it is and how it works. The instrument: the current listing in the Wikipedia. A major information resource for journalists, scholars, students and policy advisors. You can add and modify as your competence, energy and willingness to share permits.

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    2. Accelerated Learning Sessions
      Intensive learning sessions building on the Advisory/Briefs and bringing together leading edge actors and materials in specific high impact, low cost topic areas -- aimed directly at local decision makers and their staffs and advisors. The first of these sessions is being organized in Europe in March 2007; others covering other regions and countries are presently under discussion.

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    3. Advisory/Briefs
      There is today a great gulf between what is being looked at and done in the transport sector in most cities -- and the way it is being handled at the leading edge. But many of the most useful things that local government can put into play are simply insufficiently known in most places. The New Mobility Partners program provide concise information and decision counsel to leaders on outstanding policies succeeding in leading cities around the world today. Their special bailiwick: the politics of transportation.

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    4. The Gender, Transport & Equity Forum
      The GATNET gender and transport community grew from a research programme on mainstreaming gender into the World Bank's transport sector. The network communicates via an email discussion list hosted on Dgroups.

      • Gatnet Idea Factory :The list is open to all those who are interested in issues relating to improving mobility and access for poor women and men in developing countries. To join click here to register.

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    5. Global South Mobility
      Focusing specifically on the transport-related problems, performance, innovations and possibilities of the cities of the developing world in their tough struggle for sustainability and social justice. The idea here is to see how we might create, maintain and extend a useful, we call it, "collaborative relay station" capable of serving as a handy point of contact for anyone wishing to dig into this fast-exploding topic from a broad international perspective. The core idea of the program is not to create additional content or duplicate or compete unnecessarily with other sites or program, but rather to provide a convenient gateway to the best of what is going on in the various programs and sites around the world to which we are linking here -- so that you can get to them and all they offer handily with a single click. Our goal is to extend their reach as well as to supply some freely accessible public spaces where information, documents and media can be stored and easily accessed, and where people can get together to exchange information and ideas about our topic

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    6. Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice
      The only practically-oriented journal dealing with the major issues in a field of international concern, the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice was founded in 1995 in an attempt to provide scholars, researchers, policy makers and ordinary smart people concerned with the marked unsustainability of our current transport arrangements with a high-quality, independent medium for the presentation of original and creative ideas in world transport.

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    7. Kyoto World Cities Challenge
      Despite the fact that the transport sector is responsible for at least half, often more, of all CO2 production in most cities of the world, there is no provision under the Kyoto Protocols to provide guidelines, mechanisms or incentives to attack these problems. This international collaborative program is being created to take direct aim at this challenge -- in cooperation with other programs and agencies whose reach and main competence is related but not quite identical. More than one hundred of the world's leading sustainability thinkers and practitioners are participating in this collaborative effort. Area of expertise: city and short distance transportation. Only! It is very ambitious and proposes rigorous, open and checkable short-term performance targets at the level of each participating city -- along with the tools and strategies to make it happen. Only!

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    8. New Mobility Kids Network
      If children cannot get around safely and with full independence in our communities, then we are in real trouble. If there is a mine canary to the New Mobility Agenda and the challenges behind it, this is it. You have a framework here you can work with and the next step is to extend the net to bring in a couple of hundred concerned citizens like you (our proven critical mass to get anything done in this fora.) Dig in. Get involved. Make the future. [Program badly in need of new support and inputs.]

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    9. Lots Less Cars in Cities Idea Factory
      Yes, yes, we know it's not proper idiomatic English. But it's not a sentence; it's a cry! The LLC Idea Factory is by contrast with the New Mobility Cafe more activist, contentious, informal and laid-back. As the Forum announces: "What we are looking at here is not quite zero cars (in most places) but, let us say, many fewer cars in our cities, a more tranquil environment, and a lot more safe and happy people." Free flow exchanges & shared information on how to address and achieve "less car" solutions to the challenges of transport in cities. Lots on non-motorized transport and traffic reduction measures. And lots of disagreement.

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    10. Value Capture/Land Tax Reform Initiative
      An informal, shared, public interest, knowledge-building consortium -- supported by The Commons as an independent Open Society project, specifically to serve and bring together people and groups around the world who are concerned to find practical ways for our societies to come to grips with the troubling but important issues of value capture and land tax reform in an age in which important public services remain substantially under-funded.

    11. World Car Free Days Network
      Cities around the world are beginning to work with this ice-breaking sustainability approach. It's not research or theory; it is policy and practice. This forum offering information, discussion space and ideas on this pattern-break approach, for people who care about sustainable transport and aren't afraid to work at it.

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    12. World CarShare Consortium
      The world's first-stop shop for information and perspective on carsharing. Why are we supporting a concept that may to some appear to be so off-beat and marginal as carsharing? Simple! We think it's a great, sustainable, practical mobility concept whose time has come. Now in more than 600 cities world wide. Carsharing: the missing link in your city's new sustainable transport system

      • EuroCarshare :
        The goal of this pioneering annual two day event in the Principality of Monaco is to mark the notable progress that carsharing has made as a practical means of sustainable transportation in Europe and the world in the last few years -- and at the same time to make a useful contribution to speed and enhance its development in cities across Europe.

      • Le Forum d'Autopartage
        New national carshare program in France. It has taken the better part of a decade, but since the last weeks of 2005 we have managed to help crate a consortium of people and groups, both carshare providers and interested cities and public agencies, to come together to create and support the Forum International de l'Autopartage. We have set the goal of at least thirty cities with carsharing by 2010. Stay tuned! (It may not surprise you that the site is in French. We invite you to use the Translate tools to get a feel for how this is going.)

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    13. xTransit - the "third way" of getting around in cities:
      xTransit: getting people around in road vehicles, smaller than full sized buses, driven by real human beings, dynamically shared with others, and aided by state of the art communications technologies as the only way to offer "car like" mobility in most of our 21st century cities without killing the cities themselves (the old mobility way). And what's the big difference with these same concepts many of which have been around for decades? It's the technology, stupid! Stay tuned and get involved. It's your factory.

      • xTransit Idea Factory : This is a new discussion area, the Idea Factory, for an "old" New Mobility Agenda concept, which you may have known in the past as shared taxis, DRT, Demand Responsive Transport, paratransit, ride-sharing, organized hitch-hiking, and the long list goes on. Lacking anything better and in an attempt to pull all this together in a coherent package, we have decided to call this "xTransit". ( To join: send an email request to xTransit-subscribe@ecoplan.org.

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    Following to be updated]:

    1. United Nations Car Free Days Programme
      After the accomplishments of the World Car Free Days collaborative program over its first seven years, and in particular the notable success as a result of our cooperation with the City of Bogotá to organize a prize-winning Car Free Day program in February 2000, the Commons was approached by the UN in 2001 and asked to structure and lead this cooperative program in preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. This is above all a process- and event driven approach to opening the windows of sustainability in the developing world. Negotiations & hard thinking in process. Stay tuned over 2006. (And maybe you have some ideas for us?)

    2. Personal Responsibility: Walking the Walk
      We live in an age in which it's not all that easy in the rich countries (or circles) to be sustainable in our personal life choices. But there are a few tools out there now to help us do better. Check them out for yourselves. (And you may have a few ideas for us as well on this, so do let us know.)

    3. Collective Actions/Peer Support
      We have three main assets that allow us to get together to support outstanding project initiatives: (a) a group of highly knowledgeable committed people with diverse backgrounds and points of view, (b) a strongly shared interest not only in improving physical movements but also in the sustainability and social justice agendas, and (c) an effective networking and communications medium. Read on to see how we are putting this to work in 2004.

    4. World Technology Environment Prize Nominations
      After extensive discussion and some reservations, more than fifty distinguished members of the New Mobility Network got behind the nomination of Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, for his strong personal commitment to the Congestion Charging project that is bringing this important policy into the tool kit for every major city in the world.

    5. International Peer Review of WBCSD 'Sustainable Mobility' report
      The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has just issued an ambitious and much heralded report by a consortium of auto and energy producers in which it set out to identify 'pathways to sustainable mobility'. We have invited critical discussion and comment in the form of an International Peer Review. Their report and the group's critical review is available from here

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    Last updated on 18 December 2006