Back in the suddenly very old 20th century, the thrust of mainline transport policy was to find ways to fix the system that had wandered into place over the years, but only when and where that system found itself under pressure. The more sophisticated variant on that which emerged over time was the intrepid "Forecast and build" policy, which led to a self-gorging chain of investments which led close to 100% of the time to temporary relief followed by new and higher levels of requirement for city real estate to satisfy the insatiable demand of the private car.

But today, we understand that the priority is not so much to fix it here or there -- or to build it here and there. We need instead a radical and far-reaching overhaul, starting with our own thinking and vision of the challenge. Which brings us smack to the New Mobility Agenda, and with it the need for breaking the old patterns of behaviour.

The core of the pattern break approach to sustainability resides in understanding that people, you and me that is, are largely inertial creatures and that as such we tend to be victims to the world, not as we want or need it but as we happen to have found it at our doorstep this morning. And invariably there are always a lot of good reasons for either doing nothing or at least nothing today. One of these being that we do not perhaps know enough, so what we need to do is a lot more studies, scenarios analysis, commissions, conferences or "another big square book, eh?". And so we wait. And wait.

But there is no need to wait.

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Building the alternative mobility system

As with everything that is important and complex, in turning the system around we have to clear the decks and start from the beginning. Here you have the basic foundation and building blocks of the new approach as we see it:

1. The raw materials of the new system: There are many variants on the path the sustainable development and social justice whether in the context of how we get around in our cities or other aspects of our day to day lives -- but whatever they are they have to be cobbled together within the following three ground themes which together provide the necessary foundation for the new mobility system:
   
   
   • Technology - without which in the Realpolitik of the unfair world in which we live there can be no sustainable development and social justice.
   • Wisdom - which is what we need to guide the use all that terrific technology. (We need to make sure that this time we use it, and it does not use us.)
   • Compassion - or love of fellow man
   
   Love? Sound too abstract? Too soft? Out of the loop? Asking that we keep in mind things like love and wisdom at the top of the agenda and above such things like how many yards of concrete to pour and where? These are the necessary ingredients of the major cultural change that we now need to make if we are to reverse the trends and basic underlying patterns to which we have fallen victim. Moreover this explicit underlying structure can be combined and brought into a very upbeat message with a lot of positive implications. It also leads to a very interesting chain of positive ideas and positions which span many sectors, mobility included
   
   
2. Fair economics: The present car-centric system succeeds spectacularly in being at the same time unfair, un environmental and uneconomic. Sad as it may seem, it turns out to be hard these days to develop an effective constituency in favor of either social justice or real environmental improvements in our sector. But ah hah, economics! The last is without any doubt the weak spot where we need to concentrate our energies and ammunition from the outset. Drivers (and air passengers while we are at it) need to cover the full costs of their mobility choice. The literature is rich on this and the new models of how to do it -- including with the public support that is needed to make it work -- are now beginning to take hold. And this is critical to our new mobility model.
   
   
3. Concentrate on Near Term Improvements that can begin to generate positive impacts within days or at most months of being brought on line - and not potential improvements that require years or decades to come on line, which we leave up to others brighter and better informed about all that than we are.
   
   
4. Aggressive demand management: An aggressive (and well sold) repartitioning and refocusing of the existing transportation infrastructure, shifting it over ineluctably and as quickly as the local situation can bear the pain to higher throughput, more spatially and environmentally efficient shared uses. This of course brings us to increased levels of the control of private car use in certain parts of the city, at least, and in certain times of the day. There are many ways of going about this, and there is a broad background now of successful innovation in this important area that cities around the world can now draw on and adapt for their own purposes.
   
   
5. Aggressive supply expansion: The opening up of the system on the supply side to bring in the wide range of new kinds of services needed to fill the gap once we get most of the cars out. Again, these new services are characterized by new sources of supply, much higher levels of entrepeneurship and creative adaptation across the whole range of suppliers, and lots of technology (mainly in the form of communications and logistics.
   Note: the two main historical suppliers of shared transport on the city street, buses and taxis, are themselves of course in continuing and of late in many places rapid evolution in terms of their technology content and efficiency. Indeed we can anticipate that the merge between "old" and "new" carriers will in many places be a merge, with all kinds of overlaps and interlinks.
   
   
6. Packages of measure: Transportation policy needs to be -- and here I chose my word carefully - orchestrated. Demand restriction/supply increase. Policies for moving vehicles, and others for those at rest. And the list of course goes on and on. Indeed, if you look at the very large number of measures which together constitute the transportation policy environment for your city, you will note doubtless that they are large in number and by and large not of a piece. Most have been developed at different times in response to different problems and challenges, and once on the books either ignored or somehow automatically integrated into the whole. But with few exceptions, what you have there is not music, by any means, but pure cacophony. Which of course easy why the system works as poorly as it does.
   Our analogy for this is the Sustainable Moblity Symphony Orchestra, and while you don't have to like the phrase, we do hope that you will understand the need for structure, underlying coherence and integrated complexity that this seeks to address.
   
   
7. New streams of income… become available (to ingenious city innovators) as (1) they make drivers pay fairly for street and parking infrastructure, then redirecting this welcome new income to make the rest of the system work better. And (2) refashion their financial relationships with the purveyors of the whole range of new collective services (whose better performance, i.e., more sustainable mobility bang per taxpayer buck, can be expected to higher quality services that can be fairly charged for and then fairly partitioned (with payback to the public sector as only fear… and necessary.)
   
   
8. Leadership: None of this, absolutely none of it, will take place without strong, wise, firm leadership, and strong support from those of us who care. And the lead has to come above all from local government. National, regional and international groupings can help make this happen, but the precondition are the small group of people who are right next to the problems, and the opportunities - and are ready to pay the price in terms of their commitment, passion, energy (and thick skin) to stand the heat and make this work.*

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Where do we start?

The short answer to this is: everywhere. But there is also a creating historical hierarchy that also needs to be kept in mind.

The central core of the problem of today's unsustainable transport in cities around the world has its historical and technical origins in the rich West. And increasingly we are seeing how the 'western model' of transport organization has taken over the cities of the developing world.

To make a long story short, today we have roughly two billion problems in this general area: 1 billion vehicles and 1 billion people who have the means to make use of them. Hmm.

Since the bulk of the resources to do better just happen to be in those same countries that provided us with the old bad model, it is reasonable to expect that perhaps the new models for transport in cities may at least in part come out of the richer countries, that not only have longer experience with the problems but also the basic intellectual and resource infrastructure needed to do something about them. To our mind this translates to the need to keep pressure on the rich West to provide new models and examples of sustainable mobility can be achieved.

Fortunately if you look closely at the leading innovating cites, we can see that there are a number of encouraging examples. These need to be made better known, along with the information needed to explain how they can best be adapted to very different kinds of transportation and economic environments.

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