Rethinking Car Free Days in Taipei City

Your editor was kindly invited by Mayor Hau Lung-pin to come to Taipei City this year to discuss preparations for the celebration of the city’s tenth successive Car Free Day — and as part of this collaborative brainstorming process to draw on my experience of some seventeen years working with this, one hopes, transformative transportation approach in different cities around the world.

Testimony: Science and Technology Select Committee, UK House of Lords

 

In the last weeks I was asked to provide written testimony and evidence in answer to a “Call for Evidence” for the UK House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on the subject of “Behaviour Change —Travel-Mode Choice Interventions to Reduce Car Use in Towns and Cities”. As can happen in these things, in my remarks I moved away from the chosen topic (instruments for behaviour change), on the grounds that there was other more fundamental work that was needed to be done first. In the following you will find my submittal of last Monday to the committee, whom I thank for giving me this opportunity to share my views.

Unfair, unsafe and unwise – a major crisis abuilding for sustainable transport in Britain

Dear British Friends and Colleagues,

Forgive me if I am being naïve, but based on what I am reading and hearing it strikes me that there is a major crisis abuilding for sustainable transport in Britain in the months immediately ahead — as a result of the coalition government withdrawing funding from a lot of mainly small and local (since they really have to be small and usually local and focused if they are to succeed) sustainable transport initiatives This strikes me as a caring observer as unfair, unsafe and unwise.

Government planning to restrict private cars in Dhaka to reduce traffic jam.

Check and mate:

Our strong consensus here in the last couple of hours has really put the finger on it. We have learned (at high cost) that when you are dealing with complex systems like transport in large cities, you can’t depend on piecemeal or mechanical solutions to sort out what are in fact complex interactive organic problems. Fix-it approaches like this are doomed to failure before we even get them out of the box.