Why we are here

"Such a waiting game may have deadly consequences."

That's our theme. Bingo!

This project, and this site, is intended to serve both new and long time collaborators and supporters both of the New Mobility Agenda in general, as a support for the collaborative "Fast Track" advisory report now in the works with the Journal of World Transport Policy & Practice to produce this special edition. In your case, we do not have to take a great deal of your time here either in introducing our topic or in explaining why a major and massive program of wide transportation reform is required. For most of you who read these lines, you already know why.

The goal of this collaborative project is to draw international attention to the importance of finding and applying measures that will bring about transformative short term changes and improvements in the transportation sector in general, and specifically in the context of reforming the ways in which people and goods get around in our cities.

But since I have your attention, indulge me for a moment if I quickly run down the main reasons why not only major transportation reform, but also fast reform is absolutely essential. And this without further excuses, evasion or delay.

The stress on the need to achieve scale results in the very short term is critical, above all because of the high degree of urgency associated with the on-going planetary, ecological, resource and global economic crisis, now being reinforced in many of our day to day lives by the apparently inexorable move to $200 oil. Not to say the unnecessarily high social, economic and life quality costs of today's flawed transport arrangements. And of the vision behind these arrangements.

This plea for immediate reform has until now been largely ignored or run by at the level of policy and practice in most places, institutions and fora. Despite our and others' repeated efforts over the last decade to draw attention to the need to shorten radically the time window for action, the great majority of programs and discussions, recommendations and legislation, whether at the level of city, national or international agencies and decision makers, stubbornly refuse to accept this position of high urgency. While we call for action in the very tight 2008-2012 time frame, they set out scenarios, remedial programs and promised technology solutions running out to 2020, 2030 and even 2050. But the planet is already collapsing in many harsh respects.

And time matters. It really does. Every day that we dither, that we hesitate, that we hope passively for the best, our cities, the people who live and work there, and the planet suffer. If the reforms that we can make -- and that is what this special edition is all about -- can in fact help to cut traffic, reduce pollution, save lives, contribute to safer, healthier and more vital cities, then each day that we fail to make them is a refusal of responsibility. And at high costs to a huge number of people. In a phrase: a major leadership failure.(We have called this Slouching to Bethlehem.)

Against this backdrop, this special issue of the Journal represents our latest attempt to do our bit to highlight and address this extremely costly, dangerous and we believe entirely unnecessary oversight. The Agenda and the Journal have since the Journal's founding in 1993 worked diligently to get support for the argument of stressing the need for short term change, defining this in a first instance as projects, measures and actions that can be implemented and start to get on-street in-lung results in a matter of months -- while taking 4-5 years as the upper limit cut off point for the focus of this particular program.

This is not to say that we turn our backs on the need for long term thinking and vision, but certainly it does go strongly against the grain of present discussions in most places, which inevitably when they talk about change push out to much more distant term time horizons, 2020 and even 2050. When what we really need is a massive refocusing of policies, practices, and expenditures bring about major changes in a very short term, in the years directly ahead.

The simple fact is that as we are and as we act today we cannot even start to imagine what we could make of the future if we were to really try. But we are - admit it! - not really trying.

As a consequence, it is our view that at the present state of knowledge is so truncated, so incomplete, that it is simply not possible for anyone - you, me or the agency or think-tank of your choice -- to have an adequately strong and innovational view of the potential for the very large changes that are needed in the medium or longer run. In a way we have run out of gas.

All this is to say that under the circumstances we cannot even start to envisage the future since we are so firmly prisoners of the past, above all in our heads. However, if by shortening our time focus for action, by bringing in new thinking and near term reforms, and by getting transformative results, we ourselves are inevitably going to change in the process.

And as a result of the process of willful change that we have set off by our actions and results, we will come to have an altogether different vision of what needs to be done, what can be done and how we can do it. In other words, while we cannot today realistically expect to be able to envisage a future, since we are still so thoroughly grounded in the stasis of the past, this does not need to be the case.

It's time to get on with the future. The one we make happen -- not the one that falls on us while we wait.

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Topics/Coverage:

We are seeking to bring together authoritative, readable (and if possible, illustrated) articles of anywhere from one to five thousand words reporting on strategies, projects and measure can be deployed in months and are capable of having real environmental and other impacts within our chosen time focus, 4-5 years max. Teh proiejcts and tools highlighted here must, given the tight time focus, draw entirely on proven technologies and actual hands-on experience, albeit perhaps lesser known and even on a smaller scale. It is their potential for ready, relatively low cost replication in other cities and situation that holds the key.

A few examples of the sort of thing we have in mind which we list here not to narrow the scope but to broaden it through your thoughts and suggestions: Carsharing, ridesharing, transport cycling, public bike programs, TPS (Transport Priority Systems: BRT, HOVs, etc.), slow streets and zones, TDM, tele-mobility, telework, teledelivery, congestion charging, economic instruments (for both moving and parked vehicles), xTransit (shared small vehicle systems), organized & digital hitchhiking, "free" public transport, unified access systems, "NewDriving" projects (helping drivers adapt to new environment), "paydrive" meter, New Mobility Hubs, New Mobility/Smart Growth action partnerships, short term modeling tools, managing short term chaos, behavioral analysis, "playing the future", new media strategies, etc. (For more click "Action measures"..)

For latest information on topics under discussion click here .

For the editor's hints and guidelines to contributors, click here.

Other media

It's 2008 and not all good ideas are necessarily communicated only in print, ink or virtual, so it makes sense to invite contortions making good use of the full range of available media. This may be photographs, renderings and other images, and of course videos and other internet tricks and tools that can help get these important points across.

Brevity is of course a huge advantage. click here for three engaging examples to get the juices running on this.

• Do the test,

• Unexpected interview

• How public bikes do themselves in Paris

Cooperating events, outreach:

To maximize outreach and impacts, the team intends to present partial findings, interim results, complete pieces, in cooperation with meetings, conferences and other public events both during and upon completion of the project. And to the media. Get in touch with the organizers if you have ideas for us.

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Thinking exercises:

If you click to the bottom of the left menu you will see a series of presentations that, while still very rough, will hopefully help to give you a better idea of the broader backdrop of the new mobility transition in process -- or at least our view of it. Most of the collaborators for this project will already be familiar with much if not all of this. Nonetheless it may be worth a quick look.

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Translations:

As widely spread as knowledge of English as a common international denominator may seem to be the case, when you get down to the level of policy makers, groups and concerned citizens in many part of the world, in cities, full fluency - i.e., the level of knowledge that is necessary to really dig into these and other issues of complexity -- is not so widely available. With this in mind, for example, we try to provide one-check rough translations of every page on all our web sites.

But when it comes to an important decision document such as the one we are fashioning here if they are going to be useful in the intended hands-on manner, high quality translations are going to be needed. To this end we are hoping to find partners who wish to collaborate with the team to make them available. In a first instance, we are hoping to have lively readable translations in French, Spanish, Chinese and possibly Portuguese. Beyond that we remain open to suggestions and support for creating editions in other languages.

We also suggest that it will be a good idea in each case to sit down with the sponsoring group to determine if, in addition to just translation, a certain amount of adaptation might be required. This is going to require additional resources to get right of course, but these are decisions that can be handled on a case by case basis.

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Partners & Sponsors:

It is our intention to find cooperating partners and sponsors, not only to ensure the quality and the speed with which we get out this latest WTPP collaborative effort on line (that's important too), but also to seek out the media and international contacts and sources that can help us get this vital message out to key players and to responsible citizens and groups around the world. The New Mobility Agenda approach shows us how literally to reinvent transport in our cities in time to make a difference -- but we are going to need the understanding and support of well placed groups to help ensure that this message gets out as it should.

(Note: The Vol. 2, No. 1 title in this series was co-sponsored by Information Society Program of the European Commission, ensuring that the report was properly funded, made known to the media, widely circulated and discussed in conferences, projects and programs across Europe. This is a good model which we will do well to replicate here.)

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