_ The Zero Emissions Strategy Conference
_ The Zero Emissions Strategy Conference
SUSTRAN - The Sustainable Transport Action Network for Asia & the Pacific
Note: This summary has been pieced together from diverse communications by Paul Barter that appear on Sustran's Discussion Forum which is fully introduced below. Because the links between 'zero emissions' or sustainable development more broadly and what happens in terms of how we move ourselves and our things around are obviously primordial, we have every intention of giving the transport sector full and fair play in this conference. In addition to this presentation, you may also wish to have a look at
Page Contents:
SUSTRAN is a network of organisations and individuals working to promote more people-centred and sustainable transportation policies. In most countries of Asia and the Pacific the social and environmental impacts of transportation are escalating. Unfortunately, these impacts fall most heavily on people who are already disadvantaged, such as those living in poverty, people with disabilities, people in poor health, women, the very young, the frail elderly, those with insecure housing rights and people living in remote or inaccessible areas. Furthermore, current transport priorities often serve these people very poorly. A key aim of the network is to address these problems by promoting progressive civil society involvement in local, national and regional transport decision making.
SUSTRAN was established in September 1995 and now has a small secretariat in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The launching of the network was a result of initiatives by Asia-Pacific 2000, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), the Philippines Sustainable Transport Forum, the Climate Action Network for Southeast Asia (CANSEA) as well as a number of other regional NGOs, networks and academics.
SUSTRAN has expanded rapidly and has active participants in Malaysia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and several close associates in North America, Europe, Africa and Latin America. The mailing list now has over 300 people. Although the Secretariat is still very small with few resources, the network has already been able to have a significant impact.
1. Information Sharing
This is the main activiy of the Secretariat at this stage. The SUSTRAN Secretariat receives many requests for information and we do our best to answer these or refer them on to reliable sources, especially from among our participants. In addition SUSTRAN has the following information outlets:
a. News service by e-mail ("SUSTRAN Flashes"). These were the first output of the secretariat. They are released from time to time (generally once or twice per month) by the secretariat. They provide news on events, information resources and contacts on transport relevant to the region. The flashes have played an important role in expanding the contacts of the new network. They now go to over 200 people directly and many more indirectly.b. Current Awareness Service (Newsletter), "Streets for People". There have been 4 editions of 8 pages each, in January, May and September of 1996 and March 1997. This service has now been suspended and SUSTRAN Flashes are now being sent by mail to those contacts who do not have e-mail.
c. Listserver, e-mail-based discussion list, called SUSTRAN-DISCUSS. In May 1997, SUSTRAN established this forum for "many-to-many" discussions on people-centred and sustainable transport issues, primarily in developing countries and in Asia and the Pacific.
2. International Advocacy on People-Centred and Sustainable Transport.
Targets so far include the UN-ESCAP Ministerial Meeting on Infrastructure, held in New Delhi in October 1996, and the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul, Turkey in June 1996. SUSTRAN has also joined the international NGO committee which is monitoring Asian Development Bank infrastructure development lending in the region and we hope to step up monitoring and advocacy on ADB's transport lending. Other potential targets include APEC, ASEAN, and the World Bank. In addition, advocacy and network expansion has been pursued by sending participants or Secretariat members to a number of regional conferences.
3. Community Capacity Building
There is an urgent need for network participants, NGOs and local community organisations around the region to increase their capacity to take action on transport issues. Although the information sharing activities are already making some contribution to this goal, SUSTRAN needs to step up this activity.
- Air pollution and its health impacts (which pollutants are the priority in different countries or cities?).
- Global impacts of transport such as climate change (Should we just concentrate on getting rich countries to reduce their emissions or should we ALSO be searching for ways for lower income countries to avoid a high-emissions future? )
- What urban and national transport strategies are most economically efficient?
- Which are best for national security (eg. against oil shocks, foreign exchange shortage, electricity shortage, war, economic depression, etc)?
- Does a successful modern economy mean there has to be a big national motor vehicle industry and a high level of private vehicle ownership?
- Safety (especially for vulnerable road users).
- City-friendly and city-unfriendly transport (cities and towns face severe impacts from transport. Why do Asian cities seem to have such big problems with cars and motorcycles, even though car ownership is much lower than in the west?)
- Access problems of disadvantaged people (Rural poor people; Urban poor people; Women; Frail aged people and disabled people; Children and youth).
- What transport policies are best for equity in general?
- How can communities, community-based organizations and non-government organist ions become more actively involved in the transport policies and issues which concern them?
- News on relevant research, publications, policies, events, etc. on any of the issues above.
These are small matters and easy to do but they can make the list more
pleasant and useful for all of us. Some of the tips are already in the
introductory message for the sustran-discuss list (which I hope you saved).
If you have lost it then you can send a message to
Here are the reminders:
2. When you respond to someone else's comments please don't include their
whole message in your response. It is better to delete everything except
the very few lines that you are directly responding to. Also please delete
other people's signatures from your response. Some people put in
3. Try to make sure that the subject line at the top of the message
relates to your message when you respond on a particular topic. This makes
it easier for people who are suffering from information overload to skip
over topics that don't interest them.
It is now possible to access archives of the discussions on this list. You will find this very useful if you are new to the list or if you should
miss some messages for one reason or another (for example, your server
crashes or if you are off the list for a while, etc).
2. To get a copy of some messages in the archive:
Send an e-mailto
3. If you have problems, first try sending e-mail to
Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 11:54:11 +0800
I am a little concerned that discussions may become dominated by North
American (and to some extent European) issues, concerns and viewpoints.
One reason is that so many more people use e-mail in North America than
anywhere else, so by weight of numbers there is a danger that North
Americans will dominate any e-mail discussions. All of the other
transport-related lists that I know of focus on North America or Europe.
One major purpose of this list is to provide a forum with a regional focus
on Asia (from Turkey to the Philippines and the Arctic to Indonesia) and
the Pacific (by which we meant actually the islands of the Pacific along
with Australia and New Zealand - I guess "west pacific" would have been
more specific). Unfortunately "Asia and the Pacific" is something of an
ambiguous term!
One thing that most of the countries of this very diverse region (except
Aust. and NZ) have in common is relatively low levels of motorization (and
often high vehicle growth rates). Even Tokyo has less than 300 cars per
1000 people and most places in the region have MUCH less than that. So our
regional focus also implies a focus on less motorized societies and cities.
Other regions with relatively low motorization, such as Latin America,
Africa, and Eastern Europe are therefore also highly relevant. You could say
our focus in on what the car industry calls, the "emerging markets" which
they hope will save them as "mature markets" saturate with cars.
Having said all that, I am certainly NOT banning discussions on North
America, western Europe, etc!!! I just want to remind everyone to please
think about the relevance of their postings for Asia and the western
Pacific. If possible, highlight the relevance of your comments for this
region. And bear in mind that initiatives and policies which might get
dismissed as impractical in low-density, car-dependent USA, could possibly
be roaring successes in places like Bombay, Hong Kong, or Seoul which have
urban densities about 10 to 20 times those in American cities and where car
dominance is not built into the urban fabric.
Australians and New Zealanders of course may "fall through the cracks".
They are definitely part of the region but with transport issues more like
North America's. Oh well.. can't be helped. (by the way, I am an
Australian).
For discussions of alternative transportation issues in highly motorized
societies, there is already an excellent forum which you may like to join
as well. The alt-transp list has consistently high quality discussions.
To subscribe to alt-transp: Send e-mail to
In setting up this list, we have been hoping that sustran-discuss can come
to complement alt-transp by having a slightly different regional focus. I
am not keen to duplicate their efforts or to inadvertently drain energy
from that list.
Paul,
With ref to your "I am a little concerned that discussions may become
dominated by North
American (and to some extent European) issues, concerns and viewpoints",
let me share a couple of quick thoughts with you, based on rather too many
years of experience in these matters, South and North.
It might possibly be a very big mistake indeed for you to attempt to reign
in the proceedings with too much vigor for a number of reasons. This is
not to say that this whole lot cannot do with constant kind reminders as
to your ultimate geographic focus. But given your worthy objectives, it
would be a great pity for you to reduce your available brainpower.( And if
you are looking for an analogy, you may wish to consider what happened in
places in which well-meaning (well, maybe) government types decided to
place high trade barriers on computer hardware and software. Did this
authoritarian move, which led to high cost, low quality, and ultimately
low volume equipment in this vital sector, really help anybody other than a
handful of chums?)
For better or worse the leading edge in alternative transportation thinking
and practice, with pitifully few exceptions, is what we might well call the
Old World (of SOA Transportation), I.E. North America and Europe. Those
are the places that thrashed out the original (and often hugely bad)
paradigms of transportation that all the rest are now more or less blindly
following. They are the guys that write the books, provide the
consultants, fund and staff the banks, and influence the professors and
the policy makers in the Third World. For better or worse!
And, surprise!, these are also the parts of the world that are pushing
ahead with the new alternatives, to a far greater extend than in almost all
of the South. Now this is possibly worth bearing in minds, because it
means that just as they provided the old paradigm (cars all over the place
and the devil take the hindmost), they are also in the process of
developing some of the new ones.
So what we need is not a reduced forum but a powerful synthesis which
provides a means for using the best of whatever it is you can find to do
the hob . If instead you put all your regional guys in some sort of
isolated ward, you risk to get a lot of unnecessary flailing about with
ideas that just may have at least the rudiments of a useful history in my
"Old World" (take car sharing, as but one example).
Paul, I think that you are in fact moving in the right direction on this.
Perhaps as you do it, you will bear in mind one, I think, hugely useful
building block for a convivial transport system. And that is wherever you
can use clever architecture instead of lots of policing to get the results
the community needs and aspires to, everyone is left better off.
Here are a couple of quick closing ideas for you that integrate some of
these ideas in concrete practical form.
(2) And if you wish to post working papers, reports, etc. for convenient
international distribution, we would be pleased to set up a special ftp
site under The Commons, to which your subscribers could turn for easy
access.
In closing, let me say that there is obviously a lot of fine tuning that
will now be needed to make this idea of yours work, but if we all keep our
eyes and ears open I am confident that it will be possible to make the
necessary adjustments in time to maintain the momentum that you have now
started to develop. This is a modest little initiative that truly deserves
success.
With good wishes to you all, Eric Britton
About the site: Comments to Webmaster [webmaster@the-commons.org ]
1. Please think VERY carefully before sending a response to a posting,
wether you intend it for the whole list or if you want to send it only to
the person whose message you are responding to. I think some of us may
have inadvertently been sending things meant for individuals to the whole
list. If you use the "reply" function then your response will be going to
the whole list. If you intend to send to one person only then you need to
go to the "To: " line and insert their e-mail address in place of
the list address. (one very important reason to be aware of this is
because it can be very very embarrassing to accidentally send a candid
message meant for a close friend to 150 strangers!! I saw an example on
another list just this morning). On the other hand, it is an easy mistake
to make so we should all be forgiving if it happens occassionally.
Discussion Archives:
1. To get a list of the messages in the archive:
Send an e-mail to
The messages will automatically be sent to you.
For further information on Sustran:
A. Rahman Paul Barter
Sustainable Transport Action Network for Asia & the Pacific (SUSTRAN)
c/o AP2000, PO Box 12544, 50782 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Fax: +60 3 253 2361, E-mail: tkpb@barter.pc.my
Commentary and Discussion of This Paper:
[Discussion to follow here.]
We reproduce here an earlier note from the principal organizer of the forum on the grounds that it provides useful additional background on its uses and intentions. We felt that their warning as to geogrpahic focus would serve as a tmiely reminder to those working with our present conference.
To: sustran-discuss@jca.ax.apc.org
From: tkpb@barter.pc.my (Paul Barter)
Subject: [sustran] Regional focus of the list
The material on the sustran-discuss has been very interesting to me so far
and useful. Thanks everyone! But I thought I should send a reminder and
clarification on the focus of the list.
(1) Make abundant use of World Transport Policy and Planning as an
existing, highly respected and altogether appropriate print forum for your
ideas.
__ Commentary & Discussion of This Paper (Once you have registered)
__ Go to Other Podium Presentations
Page last updated on 10 September 1997.
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