The One Question

The One Question for the 2004 Summit

The goal of the New Moblity Summit is to ask a single focused question, and then to encourage the broadest possible public discussion and reactions with a view to providing guidance for eventual follow-up and action. The question has been carefully formulated as follows:

The One Question for the 2004 New Mobility Summit

(a) What specifically can we do in Toronto (b) to make major inroads in the improvement of our transportation system and its environmental, life quality and economic performance (c) over the coming two years?

Some first quick comments

Time Focus: We see no reason to try to justify the very short term focus proposed here, which should be extremely clear to anyone familiar with the issues. This is not however to suggest by any means that there is no place in the city for longer term planning and action. In both the City and the Province there are however already plenty of groups and programs that are giving these longer term issues their attention, and we are confident that they will continue to do so, quite rightfully. The focus here is however a clear sign of the urgency of the problems before the city and its residents that simply cannot be left to fester or unattended any longer. And the only way to get action on this is to address this issue directly and within this very sharply defined time horizon

Performance targets/"major inroads": This is something that is to be the subject of discussion and eventually careful study (albeit study with a profile of high urgency) both within the Summit and, we propose, over the remainder of 2004. It is clear however that under the circumstances these targets should be highly ambitious as well as highly visible for all to see and judge. Before taking this any further, let us say for now and to give an order of magnitude, that we should be looking for "major percentage changes" in the city in such things as peak hour traffic, specific environmental indicators, etc. Major? Let's say, 10% or more. And all that within our two year target period.

Why One Question?

When it comes to matters of "environment" and even more that fatal phrase "sustainable development", and when we climb out of the world of abstraction and ivory towers and come down to our public streets and private lungs, much of what has gone on in most places in the past by way of public programs, new institution building, statements of intention, questioning, research, scenarios, conferences, recipes, laws, treaties, and various and numerous pronouncements and promises, somehow doesn't end up by accomplishing very much as far as our daily lives are concerned. Based on the evidence the sad truth is this: more often than not what we get when we organize an event or assemble a group of knowledgeable people for guidance on this, are calls for more research and long term fixes on the one hand, and/or proposals or laws without teeth or the deep public support which is needed if they are to take hold and make a difference. This is not to denigrate the good work and accomplishments that can be spotted if you look carefully for them in specific instances. But it certainly helps to understand why there are not more and better, and why our system continues to be dysfunctional.

To make real progress we need to have a go at changing the underlying problem framing and solving process:

To get out of the box of conventional thinking and acting on this as if it were primarily a transportation problem.
To open up the process of analysis, discussions and solution and bring in a much broader collection of people, groups and interests as is consistent with an Open Society initiative.
To start to be very specific in terms of events, targets, those responsible, time tables, etc.

What we would like now via the Summit to come up with is a very specific set of action proposals, with specific tasks and responsibilities, objective measurable performance indicators, timetables that can be publicly monitored in real time, and a time focus that reflects the gravity, the unrelenting immediacy and severity of the problems at hand. That is to say a very short run program that aims to make major inroads in very specific ways in the two years directly ahead.

With this in view, we propose for the first week of the Toronto New Mobility Summit to focus attention on a single question -- and then to see if we can get it into high public profile to start to assemble reactions, ideas, proposals from the broadest possible range of citizens and concerned groups, both within the public sector of course but also the volunteer community (which is very important in Toronto) and from the private sector. All of whom must join in to become part of the solution. .