Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret
The call for more and smarter IT, and without undue delay, came at a time at which most of the government representatives on our task force and indeed elsewhere were not yet using email nor really the internet (remember it was 1996, though as a reminder it may interest you to know that we converted to email in 1981.. at 128 bps). And this a full decade and a half after this valuable tool set first came into use (including by us in our daily work). It was my point that if we are not making full use of our tools, then we are part of the problem. Do you agree? This was hard for me to accept as a sort of bland status quo, as you will see in the presentation that follows. I regarded it then as our duty to use the best available technologies in order to improve our chances of winning this war. And I still do today.
The full presentation is available here from our Library as a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation is not short and will take the better part of a half hour to get through. And even today it still looks pretty good in terms of substance (though the presentation is a bit dated with all those early bells and whistles, but after all it was a quickly done one-man show and that from someone less than an expert.) My hope is that the ideas and overall quality of perspective merit this expenditure of time on your part. But let me leave it to you to decide that for yourself. (Note the PowerPoint version for direct viewing here is a very large file of ca. 9 Mo., while the zipped file is ca. 3 Mo. It requires a sound card.)
"That, in our words, is Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret. Worse yet, the sad truth is it does appear to be not just a transient anomaly but rather a sign of our times, of our generation, of our egregious (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 .
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 unbiased eco-perspective we are misbehaving very badly indeed. And what is worse yet is that, rhetoric aside, there is little out there on the radar 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. What a bad, what an inexcusable joke.
That, in our words, is Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret.
What do we do in the face of this shameful inertia? Well, for one set of possible answers to this conundrum tune in to the New Mobility Agenda. We may have an idea or two for you. That after all is why we are here.
I made this PowerPoint presentation in October 1996 to a working group of the OECD's Environmentally Sustainable Transportation's program (est!) with which I had and continue to have a collegial if at times bumpy long term advisory relationship since its inception more than a decade ago. At the time I saw this as a much needed call to a more thoughtful, more innovative, more layered ("packages of measures"), more open, and more technology-assisted approach to the challenges of sustainability in a frankly non-sustainable world -- a world of people, habits and political arrangements that to all appearances has no real intention to make the fundamental changes that are needed for the planet and in our daily lives.
(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. )
From the October 1996 intro . . .
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