Abstract: About Kyoto Cities Challenge

Abstract:

This international collaborative project addresses a single question:

"What can you do in your city to reduce traffic and its negative impacts dramatically (say on the order of 20%) in a very short period (we propose 20 months), and within your existing transportation budget."

That's it. The entire thrust of this collaborative international effort is to provoke you to ask yourselves this one question. And, if we can, to help you in your search for answers, examples, references and solution paths. Nothing else!

To help advance this aggressive initiative, the Kyoto World Cities 20/20

project team is building up an open platform of expert guidance and high level international peer support mediated by the internet, placed at the service of groups and cities anywhere in the world wishing to take on this challenge - and in the process move their mobility systems sharply in the direction of higher efficiency, lower costs, and greater sustainability.

The main pillars of this Open Society initiative include:

An aggressive and highly detailed Program Proposal and Strategy in support of practical, high impact, short term, explicitly targeted remedial actions at the level of the city; with the program supported by . . .
A distinguished International Advisory Council: a high level group of recognized experts and leaders representing the wide range of fields and points of view that need to be brought in to the solution process, and . . .
A Cooperative Partners Network bringing together associate groups and informal coalitions, collaborating on an ad hoc basis to identify cities possibly interested to look more closely at these measures for closer study and eventual implementation. And all of that supported by. . .
A state-of-the-art multi-level IP Bridge offering an array of low cost high quality internet tools as needed to knit the network and the interested cities together.

A 20% reduction in traffic and CO2 in your city 20 months. That's it! All the rest -- global warming right or wrong, long term programs, scenarios, big costly infrastructure projects, the promise of new technologies in the years ahead, etc. etc. -- all that we leave to our excellent colleagues and programs world-wide. To get a detailed idea of who they are and what they are targeting for their contributions to the challenges, we invite you to check out the World-Wide Sustainability Resource Inventory right here.