Subject: Livingstone/London Congestion Pricing Prize Nomination - Your views

Dear Friends,

Please excuse me for so doggedly insisting on this, but we must get back to the WTN team with our final nomination and supporting commentaries before next Monday the 21st, noon at the latest. Again, you will find all that you need for this I would like to think enjoyable hike through the woods of sustainable mobility and the politics of the possible, if you go to http://newmobility.org and there click the WTN Nomination link. You will find some food for thought in the first forty commentaries registered thus far, and if you fear that our society is producing sheep-like agreement and indifference, this will be a refreshing exercise in variety and, indeed, passion.

At the core of this is the ultimate and unbudgeable sustainability challenge of making changes out on the street and in people's daily lives, and not just on paper and in conferences. We can be handsome on the rostrum, splendid in print, greater yet in agreeing with like-minded colleagues, but if we don't somehow do our bit to get the job done on the street, then we are happy ivory tower residents and that's it.

So dear friends, let me see if I can encourage you to consider all this in the very specific case of one embattled mayor who has had the courage to break pattern in his city a way that has wide international implications. In a world that needs new ideas and approaches that can be shown to work, we have to be grateful to people like Jaime Lerner, Enrique Peñalosa and, yes, even the irascible Ken Livingstone for inching us toward new and more sustainable mobility patterns.

So swallow your pride and vote for Ken. Or alternatively if that's your preference, tell us all the good reasons that we should be withdrawing this nomination (and I guess wait for the Second Coming). That's http://newmobility.org.

Your servant,

Eric Britton