About the New Mobility Summit

Introduction and Overview

Page Contents

Actors & Instruments

Cafe Toronto

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them."
-- Albert Einstein

The Toronto 2004 New Mobility Summit from 20-24 September is an independent Open Society initiative coordinated by the Ontario Chapter of the Sierra Club in close partnership with the New Mobility Agenda of The Commons, and aimed at bringing in and gaining the active support of a fast expanding group of concerned citizens and local, regional and national groups with a shared commitment to action for sustainable development and social justice. On the face of it, this is a "transportation project". But if it is, it breaks the mold. Keep reading.

In Brief

The core event that set off this first New Mobility Summit is this year's Car Free Day in Toronto, the fourth in a series consistently backed by the Sierra Club of Canada's Ontario Chapter with a growing group of local and city partners. For a schedule of planned events for the 22 September CFD click here.

The goal of this year's New Mobility Summit is to build on these CFD events and to take them several steps further. To this end we are initiating a much longer term continuing process, starting by bringing together in various fora during that week as wide as possible cross-section of local organizations and actors (See the Participation Checklist for a long list of those we are trying to bring to the table). Our hope is that during that week and in the months ahead this new alliance will get together to start to rethink and then perhaps to redefine the overall transportation arrangements of the city and its many parts -- in order to create a step by step process to realize with minimum delay a far more sustainable mobility system for the city and their region beyond.

We call this an Open Society Initiative, by which we mean that in a place like Toronto where there are very large numbers of informed and able citizens and committed groups, the process of governance and change should be based on broad participation and full openness of discussions and decision making.

The overall objective of this broad-based collaborative group effort is not only to cut down on the consistently growing environmental impacts of the present arrangements, but also to put our heads together to create a more efficient and more socially just set of transportation arrangements for all levels of the region. This is not a long term or a "Futures" program. It has as its target to identify and effect remedial measures and significant changes within the two or three years immediately ahead.

The core of the Toronto philosophy is the firm belief that progress can be made on these matters if we decide to make it a priority; that substantial advances can be made in months and not decades; that the cost of such a transition is easily bearable; and finally that the only way that this can be achieved is through a broadly supported, multi-part package of measures and heavy local commitment to success.

"Thinking small in a big way"

Most of the measures and policies being targeted are relatively quite small and inexpensive when compared to the usual large infrastructure projects. Their power and contribution comes to the way in which they are inter-linked, brought on line and coordinated synergistically with each other. "Packages of measures" is the key phrase.

The three critical local pillars of the remedial action program are:

Local government commitment at high and continuing levels from City Hall;
Strong technical support from the city's planners and engineers;
Creative networking that is bringing in and self-coordinating the quite large number of local public interest, volunteer and other groups and institutions directly concerned.

Beyond this the program is getting the support of several key national organizations (transport, environment), and is already getting considerable attention from groups and cities in other parts of the world who are showing interest in learning from this aggressive region-wide sustainability collaboration. The Toronto Initiative is also able to benefit from the considerable hands-on experience of the more than a thousand other participants the independent New Mobility Agenda who are being invited to follow the preparations and program as it develops.

2004 Theme: Asking the questions, Enlarging the Context

It has been said with reason of our present transportation dilemmas that "All, 100%, of the severest problems we face today are the result of someone's old solutions". Hmm. If that's true, then it's time to challenge our thinking.

Accordingly, for New Mobility Week 2004 we propose to lay the base for a region-wide consortium of citizens and groups, to step away first from the specifics that together constitute our hugely complex mobility system and its eventual advantages and deficiencies, and ask ourselves a basic philosophical question before we rush off into the details of our recommendations and divers activities.

The Einstein quote at the top of this page provides a clue to what we think to be a good starting place for the broad system rethink that is indeed the only way out of our present and mounting problems and quandaries. What Einstein was reacting to with this statement was in fact the famous Incompleteness Theorem the young Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel which states, in rough words and paraphrase: "There are questions with answers, but they cannot be known in your system of thinking or your context of understanding. But the act of asking the question -- and of enlarging the context -- is the means of discovery".

Which is what we propose to do during this first New Mobility Week in Toronto: ask the questions as the means of discovery -- openly, publicly, critically, creatively.

Not quite like the rest (Your role in this)

Fittingly for a project that is not quite like any other -- after all we are going to try to create a specific agenda and short term performance targets that are going to make major inroads over the course of the two years directly ahead -- this web site is not quite like most others. Specifically, it is intended to serve as a broad based, wide open platform for public discussions and exchanges, with the goal not only of informing policy makers and other key actors of the desires and intentions of those citizens able and willing to step forward on these issues, but also as a means for creating new, better and fairer ways of getting around in the city.

(Since this is a somewhat original approach and bearing in mind our limited means, we hope that you will be not only patient as we build and fine tune these new tools, but also that you help us to improve and extend them.)