Letter of Invitation to City Leaders

The Politics of Sustainable Transport

The New Mobility Agenda: The Commons
Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France

Tuesday, 4 September 2007

To: The Mayor, City Council, City Manager (and candidates for any of above posts)
cc: Supporting senior staff, local NGOs, consultants, concerned citizens/groups Subject: Transport innovations, strategies for city leaders
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Dear City Leaders,
Most people may not have grasped this yet, but the simple truth is that we have arrived at a point of major discontinuity in the daily transport arrangements, in our cities and in our lives. Few are more aware of this than you. And it is now time for action.
Look out the window this morning and what do you see -- despite all the work you have done and hard earned taxpayer money you are spending on the sector? Increasing traffic congestion. Lost time. Mounting pollution and public health problems. Accidents. Poorly served groups and areas. Swelling subsidy costs. City centers in duress. And now fears of $100 oil, global warming and suddenly the chilling prospect of energy blackmail. The old system may once have worked, but today it is clearly no longer doing its job. And in case you haven't noticed it, the voters are starting to. Sustainability and sustainable transportation are now emerging as major election issues.

Why New Mobility approaches are needed

Fortunately, not all the news is bad. Quietly a new era is taking shape and has already made sufficient progress so that it can be seen and learned from in the places where it is doing the job -- offering real-world, on-street and in-pocketbook improvements, many of which can be put to work in your city or community. And by contrast with traditional practices, these new approaches can generate visible results within an extremely short period of time -- and at far lower levels of cost: the New Mobility Agenda
What's the difference between the old transport model and the one that is quietly taking its place and that we are reporting on here? Well, the one that is winding down, often with considerable pain, is the hugely costly "all car/no choice" system which has dominated public policy and private practice for more than half a century in most cities around the world. The big problem with the old system is similar to that of any kind of dominant monoculture: it simply lacks the variety and flexibility and hence the resilience and adaptability needed to ensure long-term survival in a changing world.
What is starting to replace the old model in enough places and with enough success to mark the clear dawning of a new era is the New Mobility Agenda, a wide-open, collaborative, international move to a more varied, complex, robust and synergistic transportation polyculture. What is striking about this is that the main driver for this transition lies not in fears of environmental catastrophe or oil shut-down, and not even in our collective good sense or ethics, but rather in the fact that enough successful new practices and models are starting to show results that we now, finally, start to have real choices.

The Advisory/Briefs

The job of the Briefs is to introduce the best of these approaches to you and your support team, one by one and with concise, informed and balanced appraisals for your policy decisions. In a world of almost endless newsletters, websites, reports, Google searches and other sources of purported wisdom and wildly diverse counsel and views, the Briefs zero in on what we have learned from experience is the key missing link today: more informed and focused decision making at the level of local government. The city holds the key.
Each Quarterly Brief: (a) focuses on a single carefully selected priority topic; (b) targets actions that can be brought on line in months and then show visible results in less than two to three years; (c) reports specifically and concisely to the mayor, city manager and chief policy makers in the city; (d) demonstrates proof of high competence in each of the areas tackled through their quality and the outstanding credentials of the international team behind them; and finally (e) they are, well, . . . brief!
Few of us like change, and least of all anything that involves our daily lives and ways of doing things: so if you are going to try to introduce new concepts such as these in your community you must be aware that this is going to take a major effort of communication and convincing. The best way to do this is to bring in as many of the groups and interests as possible into the project from the beginning. Without ever losing sight of the fact that real communication is a two way street.
Check it out. You will see that you have some new choices and that you almost certainly will be able to put some of these good ideas to work in your city. And if you are mayor today and like your job, the odds are that if you do this and get it right you will be mayor tomorrow. This stuff works.
Yours sincerely,
Eric Britton
Convener, The New Mobility Agenda
Chair, Sustainable Cities/New Mobility Dialogues
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