Paris, Friday, May 04, 2007

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

As many of you here know we are strong supporters of any device, event or award that brings attention to path-breaking New Mobility initiatives anywhere in the world that can make a difference in their communities – and especially those that demonstrate techniques and tools that can be put to work quickly, cheaply, wisely and well in other places.

 

Over the last years we have, with the help and support of many of our international colleagues including perhaps you yourself, managed to get international recognition for people and projects that are serving to break the old patterns and stasis that is presently choking our planet and the daily lives of many, including the poorest and most vulnerable.  And we think that in each case this in its own small way is helping to make a difference and helping to encourage and support at least some people and some places in their heroic efforts to do something about our present and most unsatisfactory, dangerous and unfair mobility and access arrangements.

 

So when we find ways to get high profile international recognition for the path-breaking work of heroes (the word is not too strong) like Hans Monderman, John Gehl, and Enrique Peñalosa, Ken Livingstone and London’s heroic (like it or not) effort to break the ice on road pricing, Mayor Lee Myung-Bak of Seoul for his teams “restoration technology” efforts to green their transport system, outstanding carsharing projects like Caisse-Commune (Paris), Greenwheels (Netherlands), Co-operative Auto Network  (Vancouver), Nordic Carshare (Helsinki),  City CarShare (San Francisco), Walk to School programs in many places, Bogotá’s first path-breaking Car Free Day, the Citizen’s Car Free Day in Plaxo, and all of the vast work of the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities that has brought recognition and honor to more than 220 projects world wide – well, we think that this is an effort which really needs to go on.

 

But it’s a cooperative deal, and what I am writing to you about this morning is in an attempt to collect your ideas and suggestions for programs, awards, and other forms of recognition that we might be able to put our combined efforts to work on. I best make this one point clear first however – and that is that our quest at this point is not for nominations of people and projects that are deserving of such international recognition, because we really follow the field quite closely and indeed have many many ideas already on this, No, at this particular point what we are looking for specifically are your suggestions for programs and awards that we should know about in order to make these outstanding ventures known. Names, addresses, URLs, contact points and people, and all that we need to know to get down to work. Also, if you want to lend a hand in this, it would be great to hear from you about that as well.

 

Since this is primarily about New Mobility ideas and projects, may I suggest that our future discussions of this be carried out under the Idea Factory of the New Mobility Agenda (http://newmobility.org, top menu), and to address your suggestions and counsel on this the correct address would be NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com.

 

One never knows where this sort of thing will take us, but my guess is that it is the right thing to do.

 

Eric Britton