The Five Pillars of a Sustainable Mobility System

Building a Sustainable Mobility System

Pattern breaks

The underlying operating assumption here, in a sound bite, is that "sustainable development will not wait". If you think it will, you are probably in the wrong place here.

We're already well into the 21st century and if you look out on the streets of your city you are likely to understand that it is high time to change our thinking about transportation. The bleak reality of 2004 is that most people in most places are not doing well with today's most heavily advertised mobility package: the private car roaming at will and untrammeled on the taxpayer-funded public road, co-packaged with long outmoded ideas of how to serve those not "fortunate" enough to base their lives on their cars (also known as "public transport"). Back in the suddenly very old 20th century, the thrust of mainline transport policy was to find ways to fix the system that had wandered into place over the years, but only when and where that system found itself under pressure. But today, we understand that the priority is not so much to fix it here or there -- or to build it here and there. We need instead a radical and far-reaching overhaul, starting with our own thinking and vision of the challenge. Which brings us smack to New Mobility, and with it the need for breaking the old patterns of behaviour.

The core of the pattern break approach to sustainability resides in understanding that people, you and me that is, are largely inertial creatures and that as such we tend to be victims to the world, not as we want or need it but as we happen to find it at our doorstep this morning. And invariably there are always a lot of good reasons for either doing nothing or at least nothing today. One of these being that we do not perhaps know enough so what we need to do is a lot more studies.

The pattern break approach by contrast says that it is unlikely that under "normal" circumstances we will ever be able even to see what it is we need, if we are not to change our entire way of thinking, our mental architecture if you will. Here is one way to start.

Back to top

Building the alternative mobility system

Here you have the basic building blocks of the new approach:

Concentrate on Near Term Improvements that can begin to generate positive impacts within days or at most months of being brought on line - and not potential improvements that require years or decades to come on line, which we leave up to others brighter and better informed about all that than we are.
Aggressive demand management: An aggressive (and well sold) repartitioning and refocusing of the existing transportation infrastructure, shifting it over ineluctably and as quickly as the local situation can bear the pain to higher throughput, more spatially and environmentally efficient shared uses. This of course brings us to increased levels of the control of private car use in certain parts of the city, at least, and in certain times of the day. There are many ways of going about this, and there is a broad background now of successful innovation in this important area that cities around the world can now draw on and adapt for their own purposes.
Aggressive supply expansion: The opening up of the system on the supply side to bring in the wide range of new kinds of services needed to fill the gap once we get most of the cars out. Again, these new services are characterized by new sources of supply, much higher levels of entrepeneurship and creative adaptation across the whole range of suppliers, and lots of technology (mainly in the form of communications and logistics.
Note: the two main historical suppliers of shared transport on the city street, buses and taxis, are themselves of course in continuing and of late in many places rapid evolution in terms of their technology content and efficiency. Indeed we can anticipate that the merge between "old" and "new" carriers will in many places be a merge, with all kinds of overlaps and interlinks.
New streams of income… become available (to ingenious city innovators) as (1) they make drivers pay fairly for street and parking infrastructure, then redirecting this welcome new income to make the rest of the system work better. And (2) refashion their financial relationships with the purveyors of the whole range of new collective services (whose better performance, i.e., more sustainable mobility bang per taxpayer buck, can be expected to higher quality services that can be fairly charged for and then fairly partitioned (with payback to the public sector as only fear… and necessary.)
Leadership: None of this, absolutely none of it, will take place without strong, wise, firm leadership, and strong support from those of us who care. And the lead has to come above all from local government. National, regional and international groupings can help make this happen, but the precondition are the small group of people who are right next to the problems, and the opportunities - and are ready to pay the price in terms of their commitment, passion, energy (and thick skin) to stand the heat and make this work.

Where do we start?

The short answer to this is: everywhere. But there is also a creating historical hierarchy that also needs to be kept in mind.

The central core of the problem of today's unsustainable transport in cities around the world has its historical and technical origins in the rich West. And increasingly we are seeing how the 'western model' of transport organization has taken over the cities of the developing world.

To make a long story short, today we have roughly two billion problems in this general area: 1 billion vehicles and 1 billion people who have the means to make use of them. Hmm.

Since the bulk of the resources to do better just happen to be in those same countries that provided us with the old bad model, it is reasonable to expect that perhaps the new models for transport in cities may at least in part come out of the richer countries, that not only have longer experience with the problems but also the basic intellectual and resource infrastructure needed to do something about them. To our mind this translates to the need to keep pressure on the rich West to provide new models and examples of sustainable mobility can be achieved.

Fortunately if you look closely at the leading innovating cites, we can see that there are a number of encouraging examples. These need to be made better known, along with the information needed to explain how they can best be adapted to very different kinds of transportation and economic environments.

When do we start?

That's simple. Today!