>"Old Mobility" comes to an impass

"Old Mobility" comes to an impasse

Here you have a quick and crude but I hope both fair and essentially correct characterization of planning, etc under the 'Old Mobility paradigm'. As we inspect this list, let's bear in mind that all the news is not bad.

Over the last decades there have been great technical strides in the profession, which are going to be extremely important as we move to switch to a new paradigm of transport in cities. In fact, we can say with confidence that without the full and imaginative use of this expanding toolkit, there will be no New Mobility.

Old Mobility Planning, Policy, Decision Making

To characterize the present arrangements very broadly. the main characteristics are:

Closed system
Hierarchical
Top-down
Centralized
Authoritarian
Supply oriented
Expert based
Engineering-based (i.e., working "within the box", but with high technical competence)
Statistics based (historical)
Bounded
Reductive
Binary (private/public transport)
Costly
De facto car-based
Hardware and build solutions, technology oriented
Treats ex-car solutions as (very!) poor cousins
Sharp divide between planning, policy and operations
Obscure (to the public) decision making processes
Focuses on bottlenecks impeding traffic flows
Attempts to anticipate them and build to forestall
End-state solution oriented
Searches for large projects to "solve" the problems
Still too much separation from underlying land use realities.
Increasingly technical and tool oriented (this to the good)
Anachronistic, and finally. . .
Not doing the job that we need in 2004 and beyond!

In making this characterization we are not trying to condemn or belittle our policy makers who are working with this old model, and certainly not our respected transport and traffic planner colleagues. They are applying the skills they learned in school and which long have had the approval of their professional associations, their employers and present institutional and legal arrangements. Rather we are well-trying to understand what is going on, with both eyes focused on the fact that if we look at actual results in city after city in both the advanced economies and even more so in the developing world, we cannot honestly say that this approach is in itself proving adequate for our collective decision making and actions.

What we have with the existing arrangements is at its best an excellent technical approach for managing an ordered system -- which is however by no means the case of transport in cities, which is as we know marked by enormous systemic complexity, a multiplicity of hi8ghly diverse actors, values and decisions, ever-adaptive organic behaviour, and a situation in which it is ever more apparent that it is the non strictly transport issues that are now going to have to be factored into the highest level of the planning and decision hierarchy.

In a phrase, our challenge now is to get out of that old box.