The New Mobility Agenda: A Factory of Ideas for Sustainable Transportation

Virtually all of the necessary preconditions are now in place for far-reaching, rapid, low cost improvements in the ways that people get around in our cites. The needs are there, they are increasingly understood -- and we now know what to do and how to get the job done. The challenge is to find the vision, political will, and leadership to get the job done, step by deliberate step:

But you have to have a coherent, ethical, publicly announced, checkable, overarching strategy. Without it you are destined to play at the edges of the problems, and while you may be able to announce a success or improvement here or there, the overall impact that your city needs to break the old patterns will not be there. You really need that clear, consistent, omnipresent strategy.

The Agenda provides a free public platform for new thinking and open collaborative group problem solving, bringing together several hundred of the leading thinkers and actors in the field from more than fifty counties world-wide, sharing information and considering together the full range of problems and eventual solution paths that constitute the global challenge of sustainable transport in cities.

Starting place

The starting place is the city, your city. And if you have showed up here it just may be that you are on the lookout for some new solutions, ideas, information and perhaps working tools that can help you expand your thinking about a specific local problem, opportunity or pending project that you find yourself having to deal with. The fact is that there is a new toolset for dealing with these issues that you might do well to get to know better, the New Mobility Agenda.

A great deal of experience has been accumulated over the last years under this and similar names in a wide range of transportation reforms and improvements which are being carried out in leading cities around the world, many of which in Europe. Since 1988 the New Mobility Agenda and its numerous focus programs and international networks have monitored and at times participated actively in many of these projects and programs. One of the priority goals of the Agenda is to provide an efficient means of sharing this information internationally, as well as to facilitate direct city to city and group to group exchanges of information, experience and insights.

The Agenda looks not only at successful experiences in different parts of the world, but also at projects and problem-solving, including damage control when a given project may run into trouble along the way. Innovation is not always fully successful the first time around, and the process of performance monitoring, debugging and fine-tuning are critical to success and need to be understood by future innovators.

The role of the city dialogues is to provide efficient ways to tap these ideas and expertise for your city, without tying up too much of your time and at reasonable levels of cost. There are many ways of handling this, ranging from a preliminary consultation that may span no more than a day or two in a first instance, all the way to programs that may span one or several weeks. This website has been constructed in give you a first idea about how your project might be pieced together to lend a hand.

The details of event organization, agenda, dates, participation, funding, etc. are to be worked out in each case in close collaboration of the main partners and sponsors. Likewise for the outreach and brainstorming sessions (topics, timing, participants, etc.) and the final reports as required by the hosts

For organizational details and guidelines, click here .

Quick intro to 2009 North American City Dialogues preparations

This informal video message by Eric Britton who is leading this project is intended to open up a creative dialogue with our international colleagues concerning ways to organize and support a collaborative brainstorming and outreach tour across North America.

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What's wrong with "Old Mobility"?

We make a distinction between what we call "old mobility" and "new mobility". The difference between the two is quite simple. And important.

Old mobility was the form of transportation policy and practice that grew up in the past when we all lived in a universe that was, or at least seemed to be, free of constraints. It served us well, albeit with expectations, though we were blind to most of them most of the time. It was a very different world. But it's over.

The planet was enormous, the spaces great and open, energy abundant and cheap, resources endless, the "environment" was not a consideration, "climate" was the weather, technology was able to come up with a constant stream of solutions, builders able to solve the problems that arose from bottlenecks by endlessly expanding capacity at the trouble points, and fast growth and the thrill of continuing innovations masked much of what was not all that good.

But this is not the problematique of transport in the 21st century, and above all in our cities which are increasingly poorly served by not only our present mobility arrangements, but also the thinking and values that underlie them. We now live in an entirely different kind of universe, and the constraints which were never felt before, or ignored, now are emerging as the fundamental building blocks for transportation policy and practice in this new century.

It's time for a change

But the shift from old to new mobility is not one that turns its back on the importance of high quality mobility for the economy and for quality of life. It's just that given the technologies that we now have at our fingertips, and in the labs, it is possible for us to redraw our transportation systems so that is less inefficient movement (the idea of one person sitting in traffic in a big car is one example, an empty bus another) and more high efficiency high quality transportation that offers many more mobility choices than in the past, including the one that environmentalist and many others find most appealing: getting what you want without having to venture out into traffic. This is the basic nexus of new mobility.

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Twelve Point New Mobility Strategy

One of the greatest short-comings of past transportation policy has been that the decisions have far too often made on a piecemeal basis. But the transport system of a city is a complex metabolism; to deal with it wisely, we need to have fair, unified, coherent, and memorable strategies. Without them we are destined to fiddle at the edges of the problems: and while we may be able to announce a success or advance here or there, the overall impact needed to make a real difference will simply not be there . Here are the main pillars of the new mobility strategy that drives all our work and recommendations:

Here you have in twelve concise points the basic strategic policy frame that we and our colleagues around the world have pieced together over the years of observation and close contact with projects and programs in leading cities around the world under the New Mobility Agenda. (And if you click here you can see in a short video (4 minute draft) a synopsis of the basic five-point core strategy that the city of Paris has announced and adhered to over the last seven years. With significant results.)

1. Climate-driven: The on-going climate emergency sets the base timetable for action in our sector, which accounts for some 20% of GHGs. At the same time GHG reduction works as a strong surrogate for just about everything else to which we need to be giving priority attention in our cities, chief among them the need to cut traffic. And what is so very interesting about the mobility sector is that there is really a great deal we can do in a relatively little time. And at relatively low cost.

2. Tighten time frame for action: Select and gear all actions to achieve visible results within 2-5 year time frame. Spend at least 50%, preferably 80% of all your transportation budget on measure and projects that are going to yield results within this time frame. Set firm targets for all to see and judge the results. No-excuse transportation policy.

3. Reduce traffic radically. The critical, incontrovertible policy core of the Agenda - BIG percentage cuts in VMT. If we don't achieve this, we will have a situation where all the key indicators will continue to move in the wrong direction. But we can cut traffic and at the same time improve mobility. And the economy. That's our strategy.

4. Extend the range, quality and integration of new (alternative) mobility services: A whole range of exciting and practical new service modes are needed if we are to keep our cities viable. And they need to COMBINE to offer better, faster and cheaper mobility than the old car-intensive arrangements or deficit-financed, heavy, old-technology, traditional public transit.

5. Packages of Measures: As distinguished from the old ways of planning and making investments what is required in most places today are carefully interlinked "packages" of numerous small as well as larger projects and initiatives. Involving many more actors and participants. One of the challenges of an effective new mobility policy will be to find ways to see these various measures as interactive synergistic and mutually supporting projects within a unified greater whole. A significant challenge to our planners at all levels

6. Design for women: Our old mobility system was designed by and ultimately for a certain type of person (think about it). And so too should the new mobility system: but this time around it should be designed to accommodate specifically women, of all ages and conditions. Do that and we will serve everybody far better. And for that to happen we need to have a major leadership shift toward women, and as part of that to move toward full gender parity in all bodies involved in the decision process. It's that simple.

7. The shifting role of the car: State-of-the-art technology can be put to work hand-in-hand with the changing role of the private car in the city in order to create situations in which even car use can be integrated into the overall mobility strategy with a far softer edge. These advantages need to be widely broadcast so as to increase acceptance of the new pattern of urban mobility.

8. Full speed ahead with new technology: New mobility is at its core heavily driven by the aggressive application of state of the art logistics, communications and information technology across the full spectrum of service types. The transport system of the future is above all an interactive information system, with the wheels and the feet at the end of this chain. These are the seven leagues boots of new mobility

9. Frugal economics: We are not going to need another round of high cost, low impact investments to make it work. We simply take over 50% of the transport related budgets and use it to address to projects and reforms that are going to make those big differences in the next several years.

10. Play the "infrastructure joker": The transport infrastructures of our cities have been vastly overbuilt. And they are unable to deliver the goods. That's just great, since it means that we can now take over substantial portions of the street network for far more efficient modes.

11. Partnerships: This approach, because it is new and unfamiliar to most people, is unlike to be understood the first times around. Hence a major education, consultation and outreach effort is needed in each place to make it work. Old mobility was the terrain in which decisions were made by transport experts working within their assigned zones of competence. New mobility is based on wide-based collaborative problem solving, outreach and harnessing the great strengths of the informed and educated populations of our cities. Public/private/citizen partnerships.

12. Pick Winners: This is the political imperative! New approaches demand success. There is little or no margin of error. So chose policies and services with track records of success and build on their experience.

To move ahead in time to save the planet and improve life quality of the majority of the people who live in our cities (no, they are not all happy car owner-drivers: get out there and count them. You'll see.), we need to have a fair, unified, coherent, and memorable strategy. The work of the New Mobility Agenda is given over to trying to encourage and assist this vital process and the necessary public debate behind it.

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And what's so bad about cars anyway?

Fact: Our cities today have plenty of cars and very very large numbers of people and institutions who depend on them. They are not going to disappear from the street overnight, and we must never lose sight of their high importance to both the individuals concerned and the economic, and yes, the transport viability of our cities.

Precondition: Thus the challenge before policy makers and transportation professionals now at a time when change is so badly needed is that of redefining the role of the car so that it has a more appropriate fit with the overall texture and priorities of our 21st century cities. The indisputable fact is that if our cities are to be sustainable, one of the necessary conditions of their sustainability will be that they are home to many fewer cars. How to manage the transition when our dependence on private cars is still so very strong? We can be sure that it will not be the result of brutal confrontation. That would be a battle lost, at least in the short term which is the field on which these issues now need to be engaged.

Bottom line: Yes, we need to reduce significantly the number of cars in and moving around in and through our cities. Yes, in order to achieve this we are going to have to provide a broad range of attractive mobility alternatives which are seen by those who use them as better than the old arrangements. And finally yes, we are going to have to provide a "soft path" for car owner/drivers to move over to these alternative transportation arrangements. The soft path in a pluralistic democracy requires that the decisions are made by individuals in what they consider to be their own interest. As part of this we also have to build into our strategy in understanding that a certain amount of time is required for us human beings, change-averse as we are, to alter our daily mobility choices. (But this time, depending on the individual case, is a matter in most cases of months or at most a couple of years, not decades as often is said to be the case.)

That is the underlying strategy of the New Mobility Agenda. Not anti-car. Not at all. But cars in their place.

Why that 2009-2012 time horizon?

This is the central key to the whole effort. Because we now know that a waiting game will have deadly consequences. Hence we need to concentrate our minds and efforts on actions that are going to have early pay-offs.

And while the ideal is certainly anything that will lead to big visible paybacks in less than two years - a target that is in fact be obtainable by at least some of the measures that are getting attention here - the fact is that a couple of years of operational experience is often needed to fine tune, debug and start to get the most out of your new mobility measure. So let's give it enough time to get the job done.

In addition, within this frame you are going to have time to . . .

• At the very least to replace your present vehicle with something more appropriate for responsible 21st century city travel.
• Alternatively and better yet (if possible where you live and work) shed your car altogether as new affordable alternatives start to come on line in your community (affordable carsharing among them of course)
• To seek a better, more environmentally coherent place to live and work
• And if you are an industrial or service group, enough time to design and bring on line a new range of products and services.

And finally if you are a mayor or elected official, this gives you time to achieve your announced objectives within your electoral term. Four years: Put up or shut up. Seems fair. That's why we have elections.

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