World Streets 2012 – Focus Programs (Review draft)

If you wish to review and comment the latest working draft for our 2012 program, please click here. Your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Evaluating Public Transport Health Impacts

In the last days on the Sustran Global South Forum, Gregorio Villacorta of Metro of Lima (Peru) posted the following question to the group: “We would like to find some paper about road safety and social inclusion relationated to Metros, or other massive public transport.” In the usual good spirit of Sustran there were immediately several communications offering to lend a hand. This one from Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute is one that we think is well worth sharing here.

Progress report and work plan for 2012 – For comment and finalization

The Safe Streets Challenge has been chosen as a primary focus activity over 2012.  But there is safe, and safe. So the project turns out to be a lot more challenging than it may look at first glance.

From the editor: Safe Streets? Who cares?

It is a truly dreadful thing for anyone, me for instance, to lay on you anything as hackneyed as: a picture is worth a thousand words. But let me show you a couple of pictures and leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. The topic is the first round of reactions to our ongoing 2012 collaborative project aiming at clarifying the concept of Safe Streets from a strategic planning and policy perspective.

Carlos Pardo on Slow(er) transport?

I was thinking that, since the concept of “slow” has been around for a while, but applied to concepts such as food and “living” in general, one could think of applying it to transport policies and projects… that is, create the term “slow transport” or “slower transport”, but responsibly. Below are some notes that could generate ideas towards that direction: where the concept comes from, why and how we can apply it, and some obstacles or possible problems. I will be as brief as possible, since I could write for ages about this. My main concern would be to develop a (or yet another) way of justifying the promotion and development of sustainable transport. And my main worry is that we could just generate a new empty term related to urban transport (we have enough already).

On Private Space, Public Space, Social Space . . . and Stuttgart Safe Streets Conference 2012

Jan Gehl a few decades back encouraged us to think more about “the space between buildings”, as we pondered how we want our cities to look and function. And within this broader frame, most of us have been pretty comfortable thinking about this between-building space as either public space or private space.  But real life in a city is a lot more complicated than that, and in July of 2011 in Stuttgart a couple of hundred  of us from some forty countries, North and South, East and West,  got together for a few days under the aegis of the 2011 Cities for Mobility Congress to take apart and discuss from many points of view the third dimension, namely that of social space.

Safer Streets LA – Wrap a couple of spare neurons around this one

In the first quarter of our 2012 collaborative project on Safe Streets, we promised that we were going to keep eyes, ears and brains open to the fullest possible range of ideas, approaches and policies that promise, each in their own way, to somehow take on and perhaps do something about increasing the safety of our streets. Of course, we have our own ideas on this topic (who doesn’t?), but it seems preferable before sounding off from the bully pit to see if we might first challenge our thinking and in that process collect information and views from the wide variety of perspectives, including those which at first glance seem to be probably pretty unpromising.  All this in harmony with our long-held belief that “you never know where the next good idea is going to come from”.

Roads vs. Streets: Wherein the greater danger?

Michael Blastland plays around with some statistics, usefully!, on roads vs. streets when it comes to accidents and safety  in this article that appeared in today’s BBC magazine. (Click here for his article in full and here for the  often quite stinging comments that it has triggered.)  Ours here is quite another focus, but it is interesting to keep our eyes open for short pieces like this.

Geetam Tiwari on Pro-Poor Green Urban Transport

In this ten minute video Professor Tiwari takes a useful step back from the usual pure transport and all too often dominant technology/infrastructure perspective, taking us back for starters to the fundamentals of what is going on at the level of city dynamics and the daily lives of the vast. of the neglected great majority of all who live and need to get around in the cities in her great and sprawling country. She comes down hard on past policies that have heavily favored the well to do, while all too systematically ignoring the daily needs of the rest. And that of course is unsustainable. Let’s listen to what she has to say:

John W. Verity on New Scare City

It’s a fictional streetscape we wander, here, a metropolis whose buildings, boulevards, and back alleys are in a constant state of flux. This is every place, and yet, no place at all – a city of dreams and a dream of a city.

Safe Streets 2012: Opening brainstorm, invitation and stretching exercise

Here we are, it suddenly 2012, and time to get down to work on Q1 of the 2012 Safe Streets Challenge. This first quarter is to be given over to reaching out: making contacts and collecting information, ideas, analysis and points of view concerning alternative concepts, approaches and examples, in the hope that we will eventually be identifying and drawing attention to a very broad range of useful things to consider and study together in the hope of rendering our streets safer, more convivial and more efficient (bearing in mind that we also need to be a eternally vigilant when it comes to “more efficient” for whom and what).

Man and car: Who is driving whom this morning?

What is it about what the English call a motor car that, when an otherwise perfectly decent human enters it and slams the door shut, somehow there is a total transformation of that person gripping the stirring wheel into something, into someone who is just a little bit less decent and a little bit less human. A consistent theme of World Streets is that over the last hundred years or so our cars have not only transported us but they have also in the process also transformed us. Oops. And in the process they have fatally (I chose my word) altered the dimensions of the space in which we live our daily lives, and in the same process made this thing that was supposed simply to transport us from A to B at our leisure, into a defining part of our daily lives — and indeed in some ways part of ourselves. A cruel critic might say, half Faust and half Frankenstein.

In Memoriam: Victims of traffic in New York City, 2011

This is certainly among the saddest posts to appear in World Streets at the end of each year; it consists of nothing less than a word for word, image by image reposting of the annual carnage memoriam of traffic in New York City, that is published yearly by our friends and colleagues Streetblogs.org. We do this not only in homage of all those who lost their lives on the contested streets of the Big Apple, but also in the hope that other civil society groups that deal with issues of transportation, public space and well-being in other cities around the world will follow this lead. We do not see how the voting public and responsible politicians cannot be moved by such tragic personal stories with names and faces of innocence, no matter how brief. Of course we need to keep the pressure on them. Unrelenting vigilance.  The eternal task of the civil society.

Op-Ed: Litman on Metro Projects and Urban Road Safety

In response to a series of comments and questions that came up recently in the Sustran Global South forum, Todd Liltman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in Canada offered the following references and observations on the topic:

Op-Ed: Do you know your ecological footprint?

Toward the end of each year, I take a few minutes to run my personal Ecological Footprint scan to see if I can get a handle on how I am doing relative to myself, to others and to the planet. Seems like the least I can do, not less because it does oblige me to think about my life pattern and choices in the greater scheme of things. “Walk the talk”, etc., etc. (PS. On a more global basis, to get a feel for where the high scores hang out, this map of earth lights at night will provide you with some good clues.)

And while the Ecological Footprint drill is all very approximate, nonetheless there is , I would say, more than a grain of truth in it. (For more information on how it works, check out http://myfootprint.org/en/about_the_quiz/faq/.)