Invisibility: Just because you can’t see it (or prefer not to) doesn’t mean . . .

  

You are warmly invited to comment on all or any of these.

Poynton Regenerated: A transformative Shared Space project

The regeneration of Poynton Town Centre and its high street, Park Lane, involved a bold approach to the busy traffic intersection in Fountain Place. Martin Cassini’s short film documents the background to the project, and the dramatic changes in the fortunes of Poynton, and explores the implications for other towns and cities struggling to cope with the impact of traffic.

Contested Streets: Four Cities, Four Ways

Streetfilms, the sharp media end of the innovative www.streetsblog.org program out of New York City, has recently put on line an excellent and thoroughly updated and extended version of a documentary originally produced in 2006 as part of the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign. The film, “Contested Streets: Breaking New York City Gridlock“, explores the history and culture of New York City streets from pre-automobile times to present. Even now, five years later, it gets its important points across.

Proposal: Family Mouse International Design Competition

Dear Eric Britton,

I have been following your work and plans for the new edition of Family Mouse, and as a private environmentalist, long time language teacher and school administrator, I think it’s a great and timely idea.  So to show my enthusiasm, if you agree, I will be pleased to lend a hand in translating the text into lively and appropriate French. Please send me the final text so I can get started on it next week.

Sempé: A Short History of Social Mobility

From a collection of drawings and pastels from the edition “Nothing is easy” by Jean-Jacques Sempé, published a centruty ago in 1962, but even back then the messages as clear. (ISBN-13: 978-0714844831)

Thanks to FutureCycles Blog for helping us find these long misplaced but perfectly current iamges.

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Electric bicycles may be taken off the road (Malaysia)

ref: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=%2F2011%2F3%2F10%2Fnation%2F8214628&sec=nation

Dear Lester,

Thank you for your fine article. Can you suggest how I might get in touch with Minister Datuk Seri Kong Ch to give to him an alternative reading of how this matter can better be resolved? It is a well known set of issues, and based on what has been learned in recent years and practices at the leading edge we really do know how to handle this from a policy perceptive.

Sustainable Transport and the Importance of Pattern Recognition

In order to turn around a very big boat that is moving in the wrong direction – think global warming or any of the other wrong-way trips that we are currently  locked into when it comes to transport in cities – it helps to be smart, studious and work very hard. But it is if anything even more important to have a feel for what is really going on. And this is where the fine art of pattern recognition comes in.  Pattern recognition: all too often the empty chair when it comes to understanding and decision making in the field of transport policy and practice.  No wonder we are doing so poorly.

What do Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and World Streets have in common?

We try very hard to stay on topic in World Streets, not always easy since our bailiwick is so vast. But there are times when, if we are to do our self-assigned job, we need to look even broader yet.

One of the fundamental tenets of World Streets is that the decisions that in the past have shaped the streets and mobility arrangements of our cities now have to be sharply revised and brought into the realities of this very different 21st century. In the past the shaping decisions and investments in the sector were made in more or less closed committees manned (I chose my word carefully) by a very narrow range of social-economic groups (mainly more or less educated males, with secure jobs, fast cars and fat pensions). With the utterly unsurprising results that the mobility system they ordered up was the one that served them best: i.e., lots of roads for fast driving, cheap gas, and plenty of free places to park. Bien sûr mon ami.

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.

World Streets Social Space format: Africa, Latin America and the former SU region still MIA

If you click here you will be taken to a gallery of close to one hundred photographs of streets in a very wide variety of cities and contexts from various parts of the world.  The small map just to your right gives you a first  feel for worldwide the coverage thus far, and  click it you will see the map full size.  Here’s our problem, the answer to which may interest some of you who have more visual propensities.

From the archives: Canadian filmmaker interviews on street innovations in Paris

In the early summer of 2008 a Canadian filmmaker came to Paris to ask me to explain as best I could how the noted Vélib’ public bike system works, and how it meshes with other traffic on the streets, including Paris’s excellent Mobilien (call it “BRT”) bus system that shares most of its length with cyclist. As part of this, he carried out a Q&A print interview, whose full text follows below.

Click here for a thirty second clip from the full film which is detailed in the attached interview article.

Car-sharing will ease Shanghai’s traffic problems

Article from http://motoring.asiaone.com/Motoring/News/Story/A1Story20110108-257076.html. Thanks to Rachel Botsman for the heads-up

Is Network Dispatches a well kept secret?

According to me it should be. After all since I started to pull this together on 10 December, it has not been announced nor have I made any attempt to make it known in any way, other that with short notes to a handful or two of old friends.

Yet even without pushing, the net has its ways with information – so if you click just below you will see the location of people who have already come through the door in the last weeks and had a look. How does that work? Damned if I know.

Democracy: Destination or voyage?

Let’s hop into the car, fill it up with some cheap gas,  and take a quick tour of historic America with the help of legendary photographer Margaret Bourke-White.  The image you can see just below caught my attention yesterday, arriving here during the festive holiday season thanks to a posting in from the Rebuilding Place blog of urban designer/consultant and activist Richard Layman from Washington DC. As you can see it’s a happy holiday message. Life was sweet.

Streetsblog: Doing its job in New York City. In memoriam 2010

Each year our friends over at Streetsblog in New York City publish a heart-rending testimonial to the mayhem that automobiles have wrought over the year on their city’s streets and the cost in terms of lives lost by innocent pedestrians and cyclists. Putting names, faces and human tragedy to what otherwise takes the form of dry numbers, faceless hence quickly forgettable statistics is an important task. We can only encourage responsible citizens … Read More

via World Streets 2011

World Streets – One street at a time

This important section I shall shortly write up in full form. The topic: our “social space format” as a way of looking at a street or public place.  To follow.

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Dhaka city has its “own brain”.

To SAM Aminul Hoque:

Bingo! And thanks so much for expanding our brains a bit on this. .(Otherwise it’s a most unequal combat.)

Eric Britton

PS. I note that we thus far have one but only one great ‘social space’ image of a street scene in Dhaka. If you click to http://tinyurl.com/ws-slides you can see some examples from other great cities around the world. If you or some of your friends in Dhaka want to go out camera in hand and show us more examples of how the “social space format” works in your city, it would be a great addition. It helps those of us who have not been there to better understand the realties of daily life of the street in getting around in your city. (At least that’s the idea.)

Exit 2010. Lesson: We need to make much better use of our eyes and our brains (and our hearts) in 2011.

We live at a time when the people at the top who have to make or influence decisions in our sector are time-starved, over-burdened and, truth to tell, not about to spend a lot of time reading, or even listening or otherwise trying to ingest the great glaciers of data views and recommendations that are about to inundate and eventually freeze them solid for more thousands of years. But for those of us who see ourselves as change-agents, we need to find ways to capture their attention in order to widen their intellectual pallet in order to draw their attention to a range of new ideas and alterative problem-solving approaches beyond the ones that normally inform (and limit) their choices. Well, what about a series of attention-grabbing, lesson-purveying one-minute movies that can get them thinking in broader terms? And better than that, share with their families and colleagues. Might we have a look and think about this together?