1, 2, 3
In brief
Project organization
1. The xTransit project
2. Smart ParaTransit
3. New Mobility Agenda
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| xTransit: The Third Way of getting around in cities | |
Our 21st century cities and people who live and work there face transportation requirements that have little in common with the historical past. They (i.e., people's service needs) are closer to what we can see in successful car-based systems than traditional public transport. That is to say, the user requirements are for the most part not linear, nor strictly time-cadenced. They are highly varied over time and space, involving an ever-changing kaleidoscopic mix of many origins, many destinations, many different times and many different levels of requirement. Requirements that seemed to have been well served in the past, for a privileged minority at least, when our cities were far smaller, less encumbered, drivers relatively few, and the planet and its resources seemingly infinite by comparison to the burden of a system that served a small minority. But we are living in a very new and different century, the picture has changed massively, and it now time to look afresh at the full range of options and possibilities. It is in fact time to Reinvent Transport in Cities.
xTransit (also often referred to as "paratransit" - see references on this) is a broad and varied class of transportation services that have in common that they get groups people in and around cities in road vehicles, smaller than full sized buses, driven by real human beings, dynamically shared with others, and in best cases aided by state of the art communications technologies -- and all of that as no less than the vital supplement needed to offer "car-quality" mobility in most of our ever-more crowded, ever-more environmentally stressed 21st century cities without killing the cities themselves.
This class of services is not going to replace all cars. Nor will they drive the traditional public transport providers out of business. But they are now going to profoundly alter the transportation scene in our cities around the world. As you will see, the multi-level New Mobility configuration, of which they are an important element, draws together a very large number of varied and complementary services.
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| Organization of this project | |
The job of this section of the WorkPad - placed here to get the discussions and serious work going and with no pretensions of being in any way definitive - is to rough out the main antecedents and eventual raw materials and components of a well-working 21st century xTransit system. It is being posted at this point as part of the process of starting to define and development useful materials and perspectives on this important and as yet hugely underexploited mobility asset. (If you want to see an example of the sort of thing that we are targeting to provide under this heading, our World Carshare project at http://worldcarshare.com is the best example that we can cite today.)
What follows here is presented then as an open starting point and first information base for future collaborative work in this area, which is much needed to help us all to understand better how all of this fits in with the new policy frameworks that we now need to use to drive transport and related decisions in our cities.
We are calling this interactive website for now a "WorkPad": a dynamic collection of pages, discussion points, preliminary entries, ideas, information and references which are laid out here and presented in ways which facilitate their correction, extension and updating as the collaborative learning curve evolves. Keep reading and you will see how it is intended to work. And then, one hopes, you will pitch in to help us all make this into a more complete and more useful set of information tools for the much needed transformation process in our cities around the world.
| 1. Laying the base: xTransit WorkPad | |
The job of this componenet of the project is to introduce our topic in the broadest sense.
- What is xTransit?
- What is its past?
- Who does it serve?
- What are its main building blocks?
- Where can you turn for more?
- What is going on at the leading edge?
- What is going to be needed if it is to make its full -- and much needed -- contribution to the over-charged transportation systems and environments of our cites?
If you work your way down the menu to your left, you will see a first set of referencees and invitations to discussion, of these and other key questions.
For more on the WorkPad, click here .
| 2. Smart ParaTransit cooperative project with Livable Cities Network | |
Smart ParaTransit is a specific, and to our minds the most promising, subset of xTransit. For this reason the New Mobility Agenda and its networks are extremely pleased to be able to join forces with the Livable Cities Network and their new (August 2008) Smart ParaTransit collaborative project.
Smart ParaTransit -- which we define basically as SOA 21st century technology-driven shared transport arrangements -- is the missing link in our 21st century transportation policy tool kit. It takes direct aim at the enormous service gap that today exists between individual transport arrangements , motorized or other, and large vehicle public transport services, which by their nature depend on fixed routes and schedules.
This collaborative project not only attempt to provide useful insights and support for SPT system planning, implementation and replication, but also has set out to put this dynamic collection of modes in the necessity broader strategic context, namely that which is set out by the New Mobility Agenda and its related programs and projects. Which as you will understand are not at all unique to the Agenda, but which are broadly shared by leading edge thinkers, programs, groups and cities around the world. This is, in fact, the future of transport in cites.
For more on the collaborative SPT project, click here .
| 3. The New Mobility Agenda | |
We cannot look at these or indeed any other mobility services or projects in isolation, no matter how promising they may look in themselves. They need to be understood and developed with a broader strategic global context. This context is what we call the New Mobility Agenda. Full information on this approach will be found here and in more detail on the Reinventing Transport in Cities site at http://www.invent.newmobility.org . However by way of brief reminder here are the basic principles of the Agenda
Seven steps to reinvent transport in your city
Virtually all of the necessary preconditions are now in place for far-reaching, rapid, low cost improvements in the ways that people get around in our cites. The needs are there, they are increasingly understood -- and we now know what to do and how to get the job done. The challenge is to find the vision, political will, and leadership to get the job done, step by deliberate step:
Why the tight 2008-2012 time horizon?
This is the central key to the whole effort.
Because we now know that a waiting game will have deadly consequences. Hence we need to concentrate our minds and efforts on actions that are going to have early pay-offs.
And while the ideal is certainly anything that will lead to big visible paybacks in less than two years - a target that is in fact be obtainable by at least some of the measures that are getting attention here - the fact is that a couple of years of operational experience is often needed to fine tune, debug and start to get the most out of your new mobility measure. So let's give it enough time to get the job done.
In addition, within this frame you are going to have time to . . .
And finally if you are a mayor or elected official, this gives you time to achieve your announced objectives within your electoral term. Four years: Put up or shut up. Seems fair. That's why we have elections.
For more on the New Mobility Agenda, click here .
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