Dear All:

We just finished a report compiling and comparing transport and air quality indicators data for 12 India cities. The report handout is available at

http://www.embarq.org/en/india-transport-indicators

These are indicators reported in city development plans, comprehensive mobility plans, comprehensive traffic and transport studies and detailed project reports submitted to the Ministry of Urban Development between 2005 and 2007. The list was created with an intention to include, metropolitan cities, cities with ongoing or future BRT projects. We divided the 12 cities into three categories, “metro” cities (Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi), “millennium bloomers” (Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Pune) and “now exploding” (Bhopal, Indore, Jaipur, Mysore, Rajkot and Surat).

Look forward to hearing you comments.

Sincerely;

Madhav

Madhav Pai

Technical Director - India

EMBARQ, The WRI Center for Sustainable Transport
Godrel & Boyce Premises

Gaswork Lane, Lalbaug,

Parel, Mumbai 400012

email: mpai@...

phone: +91 22 24713565

fax: +91 22 24713591

cell: +91 99875 48808
website: embarq.wri.org
blog: TheCityFix.com

“What lessons can America learn from the rest of the world in terms of transportation developments that are safe, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable?

“We Americans often think of ourselves as sitting at the very top of the social, economic, technological, entertainment, and political pyramid.  After all, we invented human flight, the Super Bowl, the Interstate Highway, the transcontinental railroad, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.  But perhaps we’re not as advanced as we like to think.  Perhaps innovations in transportation, land use, and energy consumption are much more evenly distributed around the world than we ever thought possible.  Indeed, perhaps America is closer to the middle or bottom of the pyramid when it comes to transportation investments.  What lessons can America learn from the rest of the world in terms of transportation developments that are safe, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable?”

Here is that collection of interesting responses to my invitation of a week or so ago to provide very short brainstorming bits in response to the above famous question.  I share this with you with a couple thoughts in mind.  First by way of information, just in case some parts of this may be of interest to you.  Second, in case you have any suggestions about any of the entries you see their us far, including eventually URLs for reference for anyone who might wish to follow further on any of these ideas.

And finally, might it be that you yourself might have a last-minute entry into this pantheon.  I think you have all of the necessary guidelines for this but if you can find them let me know and I will set them on immediately. It will take another week or so for me to whip this thing into final form for submittal to the editors, in part because I am hoping to pick up at least some additional messages on areas which I would like to have heard more about which are not yet cover her intercourse it is a huge universe of issues and approaches out there, but I would certainly have liked to have had a few more messages from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and the long list goes on. 

And anyone mention China? India? Japan? Africa. Sure Europe is leading in many respects but there is a big world out there. (Reminds me, you may want to play with www.knoogle.net to see if and how that might help feed your curiosity on any of this. That after all is what it is for.)

It is just that there is so many interesting things happening here that the world, and our friends back in Washington, really do need to know more about.  Of course we cannot educate them (and ourselves) in a single piece like this, but maybe we will elicit some interest and drive some initiatives that otherwise might not have been there.  If that happens, this work would have been well worth it

Can you imagine that we have none or next to no-discussion of issues as important as value capture, carsharing, road pricing, digital hitchhiking, free public transport, parking policy, public bikes, linking better civil society with formal government, Vision Zero and other ideas that make people sit up and think, concepts like the "street code" "Code de la rue"), and oh dear this list goes on and on.  And not a mention of media to get these good ideas across. But if we can capture a few more of these great ideas in the week ahead, I would be most pleased and I am sure that a number of you would as well.

When I have all this in hand, including whatever feedback you would care to share with me, I will dump this to the National Journal who will then circulate our contributions to something like 12,000, 13,000 "Washington insiders" (kind of scary that).  We can hope that they will read it, profit from it, and use some of this to make a difference. We need it over there.

All the best and with many thanks,

Eric Britton

Friends of the Earth analysis of how each state intends to spend their infrastructure money:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=HPD3BErF2V%2FD%2F5%2FZdKUJMzS%2FlBPe0Ce8

My state, Massachusetts gets highest marks:
47% on transit
27% on highways -- all for repair work.

Robin [Chase]
GoLoco.org
MeadowNetworks.com

Please find attached a graph (plus short document) on international fuel prices in November 2008 from our friends over at GTZ.  Thought-provoking.  Enjoy.  Eric Britton

Australian city planning hurtles towards crossroads

JOHN WHITELEGG

4/02/2009 9:02:00 AM

The world's great cities are at a crucial tipping point in their development. London is finding it difficult to cope with the growth in demand for public transport, Beijing has serious air pollution and the infrastructure of US cities is collapsing. Australia's cities are rightly regarded as some of the finest urban environments in the world but they, too, are in trouble.

The Sydney city region is typical. Its traffic levels are among the highest in the world, its air pollution routinely breaches World Health Organisation standards, and its planning and metropolitan governance are not fit for the purpose. Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne have fuelled traffic growth with an excess of highly expensive new highways and a failure to recognise global trends in so-called demand management.

London has its congestion charge, Toronto will not build new roads and many other cities are heavily into high-quality public transport, walking and cycling strategies. Australia is being left behind.

Transport planners and geographers have repeatedly identified the links between large new expensive bridge, tunnel and highway projects and traffic growth. These projects intensify automobile dependence, produce unhealthy citizens and make cities expensive to run.

Sydney's poor-quality walking and cycling facilities deter its citizens from making use of cheap, healthy alternatives to the car. This adds to the obesity toll and related diseases such as early-onset diabetes. The heavy reliance on cars makes for a foul stew of poor air quality which adds to respiratory disease and hospital admissions, and actually spending time in cars adds to the negative health impact. Researchers in several countries have identified the high levels of air pollution (including those pollutants causing cancer) inside cars and still Australia's urban residents spend significant amounts of time in their cars and take the children to school by car.

Canberra suffers from energy-greedy urban sprawl. The long distances to be travelled, the over-generous road space provision and the lack of high-density, mixed-use, attractive urban planning make Canberra a far less attractive place than its splendid physical environment would suggest.

The expansion of Sydney to the west and Melbourne's abandonment of an effective urban boundary make things worse. The loss of agricultural land reduces the robustness of Australia's food supply system and makes the nation extremely vulnerable to shocks that will flow from peak oil and climate change. Local food and agricultural produce not based on huge oil inputs are vital to resilience and survival, and are being squandered around Melbourne and Sydney.

Peak oil is looming and Britain's Local Government Association has issued advice to all local authorities on how to deal with it. The smart money is currently on 2012 as the crunch year but the actual year matters less than the impact. Australia's cities will be approaching maximum oil dependence at exactly the time when global oil availability is falling fast and the oil demands of China and India are really taking off.

This is a national security threat as well as a problem for cities and it needs a robust response. Australia's expanding suburbs makes things worse and are exactly the opposite of what we should be done. Sweden has recognised the importance of reducing oil dependence in its ''Oil free by 2020'' policy and it would be very smart indeed for every city and state in Australia to follow suit.

There are five things that can be done to make Australian cities resilient in the face of peak oil and climate change. Each city needs:

A clear metropolitan strategy that will reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gases. This would cover transport, renewable energy and energy use in buildings.

A clear transport plan that focuses on active travel and the greatest possible increase in walking and cycling. A minimum of 500km of segregated cycle paths is needed in each city.

A thorough re-engineering of urban space so that pedestrian pavements are widened and pedestrian journeys rewarded with waiting times at crossing points reduced by at least half.

A comprehensive organisational re-engineering of rail, bus and ferry systems so that total integration of all kinds is hard-wired into the system.

A large-scale local food project based on no more loss of agricultural land, the doubling of food production by 2012 and de-coupling food-growing from oil dependence.

The choice between resilience and lack of resilience has to be made in 2009, and the choice is between a healthy, successful city and a failed city. The reality behind these choices is that a shift into a resilience strategy benefits everybody and provides long-term security and quality of life for all the citizens of urban Australia. There is absolutely nothing to lose and absolutely everything to gain.

The author is managing director of Eco-Logica, a transport consultancy based in Lancaster, England, and a visiting professor of sustainable transport at Liverpool John Moores University.

A quick update on this collaborative project which is doing very nicely and is still open to your active participation, either by reviewing and commenting on what we have thus far assembled or, if we are lucky, having a contribution for you so as to fill out what is genuinely starting to be a worldwide perspective on transportation innovation and messages for America.

To get yourself up to date, I attach a set of extracts from the draft report in progress, and would draw your attention to the introductory section which explains the game plan and intentions.  In addition to the continuing work and many excellent contributions that are coming in, there have been two rather important changes that would like to draw to your attention right now:

·         The closing date for the contributions has now been set back to 19 February.  This gives me a week to finalize, edit, polish, etc. the report, which will then be submitted to the editors of the National Journal in Washington DC on 26 February.

·         It has also been decided with John Whitelegg that we will be doing a Special Edition of the Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice which will appear this spring.  I am especially pleased about this because it means that all of our hard work will not only get a first use to stimulate discussions and hopefully some action in Washington DC, but also that it will then get out to a much broader audience and be available to our friends and colleagues around the world for consultation and use at our usual price, that is free.

Have a look at the list of countries just below which covers the contributions thus far received, And if you do not see your country there, perhaps you will give some thought to an article, author, or point that you might like to see taken up under your national heading.  I for one would like to see more from Eastern Europe, Russia, and all of the now dispersed nations of the dear old Soviet Union (sob!), and I know that there are some projects and policies in South Africa, Tanzania, and other parts of Africa which really do have lessons for transportation planners and officials in the United States.  Off the top of my head I can think in terms of things like shared taxis (by their many names), small bus systems, street sharing (formal and informal), the odd bike project, and the several BRT projects that are making their way, but I know there are others as well.  And projects in Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East and throughout Asia.

There is also the matter which is brought up in the Polish essay by friend Marek Utkin, which he is entitled “We badly need a new American transportation model (somebody broke the one you sent us)”.  I think that is a great and timely (and funny) theme and I would like to see others of you building on this approach.  This too is a message for America.

That’s it.  You will see our list of countries thus far and authors thus far just below, but that place you really want to go to see where things stand is the attached -- and should you wish to obtain a copy of the latest version of the full report, this will always be available at www.messages.newmobility.org .

I look forward to hearing from you on this, and hope you appreciate all the hard work of our colleagues are putting into this.

Teamwork

Eric Britton

Austria, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Europe, France, Germany, Global South, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the
United States of America

Robert Anderson, Alexander Berthelsen, Eric Britton, Dave Brook, Martin Cassini, Julien Chantefort, Colin Clarke,  Andrew Combes, Philippe Crist, Andrew Curran, Todd Edelman,  Paul Fenton, Geoff Gardner, Jan Gehl, Marie Danielle V. Guillen, Ann Hackett,  Peter Hotz, Adhiraj Joglekar, Jeff Kenworthy, Murray King, Martin Kroon, Morten Lange, Roy Langston, Zvi Leve, David Levinger, Michael Lewyn, Todd Litman, Sabine Lutz, Margaret Mahan, Karel Martens, Rory McMullan, Paul Minett,, Mikel Murga, Peter Newman, Pascal van den Noort , Richard Oram, Carlos Felipe Pardo, Joanna Parr, Anthony Perl, Gil Penalosa, Ian Perry, Mark L. Potter, Gordon Price, Danijel Rebolj, Per Schillander, Robert Smith, Gladwyn d'Souza, Joseph Szyliowicz, Dino Teddyputra, Marek Utkin, Chu Wa, Conrad Wagner, Paul White, John Whitelegg, Peter Wiederkehr, Peter Wilbers, Paul Wren, Gus Yates, Michael Yeates

We have use Skype extensively for more than two years now on a daily basis and find it a very useful communications and groupware tool.  That it costs nothing and works well for our purposes is our message and recommendation of the day.  Eric Britton

Skype makes a good thing even better

By David Pogue

Published: February 5, 2009

So what about Skype?

If you're under 30 or so, you probably know all about Skype. It's a free program for Mac, Windows or Linux that connects you to other people who have Skype. You can type instant messages back and forth, make crystal-clear audio calls, and, yes, even make video calls, provided your computers have webcams or built-in cameras - all without paying a penny.

No wonder more than 300 million people have tried Skype. It's a natural for the college crowd, in particular; free calls are especially attractive when you're young and broke and far from friends and family. Of course, plenty of other programs do the same things: iChat, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, SightSpeed and Oovoo. But because of its simplicity, its quality and its early start, Skype is the one whose name has become a verb.

On Tuesday, after a year of public testing, the Skype team, now owned by eBay, released Skype 4.0 for Windows, which the company calls "the biggest new release in Skype's history."

The first change strikes you immediately - and during the months of public testing, howls of protest came from many among the faithful: Skype is no longer a flotilla of little windows dancing around your screen. It's now a single, consolidated window. You can still carry on multiple chats or calls simultaneously, but you switch among them by clicking their names in a list at the left side, rather than juggling multiple windows. A variation of the old arrangement is still available.

All kinds of useful features are on display. You can drag various sections of the software to resize them; discreet notifications pop up from your system tray when people are trying to reach you; you can import the address book from Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook or other e-mail services.

The most important changes in Skype 4, though, have to do with video calls. If you've ever used video-chat programs before, then you know what an unsatisfying experience it can be. The picture breaks up. Connections get dropped. Quality comes and goes.

Worst of all, there's that annoying delay that makes both you and your conversation partner come across as slightly dim-witted. Reactions lag, jokes fall flat, and you wind up accidentally interrupting each other, all because there's a one-second delay between the time you say something and the time it comes out of the other person's speakers.

The video quality still varies when you use Skype. Fast Internet connections and fast computers still work better than slow ones. But if you do have a good connection, camera, and computer - wow. Skype 4.0 can deliver a picture that's as big and sharp and smooth as a TV picture, with almost no delay.

In my test calls to friends in California, New York and Virginia, we were amazed at what a difference it makes when the delay goes away.

According to the company, you get the best results if both parties are using Skype 4.0 for Windows, or Skype 2.8 for Mac. But some quality improvement will be apparent even if only one party has the latest.

Skype's audio quality has always been terrific, more like a CD than a telephone, so if you have decent speakers, audio calls have an eerie, you-are-there presence. But the company says that the new version requires only half as much data to transmit all of that sound and video. In other words, no matter what your Internet connection, you'll be more likely to get clear sound.

Skype's video now offers some handy bells and whistles. You no longer have to start a video chat by first starting with an audio call, for example; there's a dedicated Start Video Chat button. You can also expand the window to full screen, or capture a still image during the call, with one click.

You can also resize both your partner's video image and your own, smaller, "picture-in-picture" image, or drag them around the screen to suit the situation. And a small utility strip below the picture offers space to type Web addresses or other instant messages to your partner. You can even send a file by dragging its icon off the Windows desktop right into this typing box.

Still, the new Skype is not necessarily the king of video-chat apps. It's missing some big-ticket items that you can find in its rivals. For example, although Skype can accommodate several participants in a typed chat or an audio call, video calls are strictly one-to-one. In programs like Oovoo, SightSpeed and Apple's iChat, by contrast, several of you can be on a single video call, creating virtual meetings that bring together participants from far-flung corners of the globe without involving airplanes.

SightSpeed also offers a "video answering machine" - your buddies can leave a video recording for you when you're not around. The paid versions of SightSpeed's service also offer one-click recording of your video chats, which can be a useful record indeed, especially in matters of the heart, or business deals.

And while we're quibbling: it's great that Skype offers the chance to place calls from your computer to somebody's actual telephone for a couple of cents a minute - that, after all, is how the company makes money. Rates are, for example, $3 a month for unlimited calling to U.S. and Canadian phones, or $10 a month globally. But Skype really shouldn't charge you to send text messages this way. Other chat programs let you send text messages straight to people's cellphones at no charge to you.

Even so, Skype 4.0 is better than before, and it's free, and that means it's a no-brainer to upgrade. So if video calling is inching closer to being instantaneous, clear, and satisfying, does that mean that AT&T's 1964 vision will finally come to pass? Will we one day adjust to the idea of being on camera every time someone calls?

Nah. In the end, video chatting isn't a replacement for phone calls but a supplement to them, a perfect way to check out someone's new place, check in with distant family and friends or show off a new talent, or baby. They saw the possibilities back in 1964 - they just didn't realize that we wouldn't always want to use them.

Thanks to Faizan Jawed for the heads-up on this. From http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13047681&source=hptextfeature&CFID=41445608&CFTOKEN=73494795  Thought provoking.

Home again, home again

Feb 6th 2009 From Economist.com

Getting from one place to another in four cities

London | Delhi | Tokyo | Homer

London

IT SEEMS odd to be talking about the daily grind of commuting on a day when most of London stayed at home. There were no buses running, many trains were cancelled and if The Economist’s Monday morning conference was anything to go by, people whose presence is normally regarded as essential phoned in instead. But as it happens my train from Cambridge ran only a few minutes late, and although I had to walk my bike much of the way from King’s Cross to The Economist’s offices in St James’s (why are London’s roads not gritted in preparation for snow that has been forecast for days?) I got to work only a little later and damper than usual.

I moved out of London for the same reason as thousands of others: I became a parent. I was no longer getting any benefit from the good stuff (theatres, galleries, shops and so on) and suddenly the bad stuff—the dirt, the lack of space, the cost and above all the schools, so many of them depressingly dreadful—started to matter. I was working a day or two a week in Cambridge at the time, so in 2003 I traded one three-bed Victorian semi-detached house for another. My new house was almost identical to my old, but it was within a short cycle of one of the world’s most beautiful town centres, on a quiet street, with a hundred-foot garden and facing a park. It was cheaper, too.

So two years later, when The Economist offered me a job in London, I was not keen to move back. Instead I acquired a folding bike and an eye-wateringly expensive yearly season ticket (every year the price goes up by more than retail-price inflation; it now costs £3,500), and became one of around 700,000 people who commute by train into London every day.

My trains come and go from King’s Cross, one of London’s biggest and busiest stations, which is undergoing seemingly interminable renovation. The platforms on the underground get dangerously overcrowded during the morning rush hour as people change between the six lines that stop there, so one of the entrances to the underground station is closed, forcing my fellow commuters who need to use the tube for their onward travel to queue at the other entrance in single file. Many of them will already have endured a cramped and uncomfortable journey: the line from Cambridge to King’s Cross is Britain’s most overcrowded, with figures published last August showing that it had four of the six trains with the highest ratios of standers to sitters in the country. I am lucky: I can work varied hours and mostly miss the worst of it.

I lived in London for a spell in the early 1990s. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing London at almost its most depopulated in 50 years. In 1939 8.6m people lived in Greater London, but that fell to a low of 6.7m in 1988. Since then the population of London has risen by almost 50,000 a year—an increase largely fuelled by immigration. Around 7.5m people now live in the city.

In the past year or so, however, net migration has turned negative, and there is a great deal of churn: last year around 150,000 people come to London from abroad, and around the same number from other bits of the United Kingdom—most of them young and childless. Roughly 380,000 Londoners left, many of them older, or parents.

Modern travel patterns poorly suit an old, crowded city, and much of London’s infrastructure is crumbling. London’s underground was the world’s first (the Metropolitan line opened in 1863), and in recent decades repairs on the ageing trains and escalators were often let slide, creating a huge backlog. Other developments over that period: the congestion charge, introduced in 2003, without which London would presumably face total gridlock; “bendy buses”, an incomprehensible waste of precious road real estate; and unpredictable diversions due to Thames Water’s constantly shifting upgrade-works on London’s Victorian sewers and water mains.

Among the biggest changes in commuting habits has been the increase in cycling. In 1992 it was an eccentric habit I had picked up while studying in Cambridge—by a wide margin Britain’s most cycle-friendly city. Now lots of Londoners do it, which is good—other road users are more aware of us—and bad—now that they notice we exist, they almost uniformly hate us. Ask them why and most will say it’s because cyclists break rules, which they do—but no more frequently than pedestrians or motorists. As I leave behind the morning hordes queuing to go underground at King’s Cross, or sail past a bendy bus straddling three lanes and blocking a busy junction as it tries to turn a corner, I know the true reason is jealousy.

When I came back from maternity leave after my second child our editorial manager asked if a BlackBerry would help me to manage my time. I turned the offer down on the grounds that I needed somewhere to get some real work done. In the mornings, the 50-minute journey is perfect for sketching out an article; in the evenings I read, usually something work-related, or muse over a story lead or title, or (on Wednesdays, our busiest and longest day on the paper) sleep. I feel sorry for commuters I see reading newspapers, or emailing: they are wasting the best bit of the day.

Delhi

FOR the residents of Khanpur Colony, a neighbourhood in South Delhi, the morning commute begins with a squeeze and a sprint. Their homes are separated from the bus terminal by a patch of walled waste ground, owned by the ministry of defence. Signs warn against trespassing. Wives hang their washing on barbed wire. But the wall is interrupted by a deep ditch, where pigs nose about with birds perched on their backs. There is just enough space between the ditch and the wall for a steady stream of schoolchildren and commuters to squeeze past and make a dash for their bus.

Boarding buses in Delhi is often an athletic event, worthy of inclusion in the Commonwealth games, which the city is preparing to host in 2010. The Delhi Transport Corporation’s old stage-carriages pause at stops for only half a beat, before plunging back into the traffic. The doorway is at knee height, and one narrow foothold of space is often all one can wrest from other passengers.

AFP

But the terminal next to Khanpur Colony marks the beginning of Delhi’s new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor. Passengers wait at raised stops, which resemble train platforms. Railings channel the scrum as the bus arrives. The shiny new buses, slung low unlike their forerunners, are much easier to board. Indeed, stand in the wrong place and the crowd’s momentum might carry you onto a bus you had no intention of riding.

Your correspondent pays 20 rupees ($0.40) for an 18km journey from the terminal to Old Delhi railway station. The 419AC is heated in winter and air-conditioned in summer. It is even equipped with seat belts, which go largely unused, judging by the dust the strap leaves on my lap.

The BRT has infuriated car drivers, whose complaints were loudly championed by Delhi’s big English newspapers. Cars are used to bullying and jostling their way across the full expanse of the road. But the BRT sequesters them into two or three lanes, squeezed between a cycle-path along the kerb and a dedicated bus lane down the centre. This segregation is fitfully enforced by marshals, ridges, railings and other devices, such as the red “cat’s eyes”, which flutter in the morning mist.

Cars need no longer fear crushing cyclists or being crushed by buses, but this is small consolation. For drivers, there is only one thing worse than being stuck in a traffic jam, and that is being stuck in a jam while bikes pedal serenely past on the left and the BRT lane stands empty on the right. (Nor are motorists amused when bus passengers make faces at them as they sail past.)

The system suffered from a lack of marketing prior to its introduction, leaving road-users bewildered and enraged by the inexplicable markings and barriers. In its early days, the BRT took its middle initial too seriously, as bus drivers raced down their new corridor. The city responded by laying “rumble strips” on the road. It also fitted buses with global-positioning systems: you can track their progress and speed online.

Is the BRT too ambitious for Delhi’s clogged roads? The city has as many vehicles as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai combined. In handling this traffic, city planners face two dilemmas, says Geetam Tiwari of Delhi’s Indian Institute of Technology. First, how much space should be devoted to roads? Roads already occupy 21% of Delhi’s total area, a far greater percentage than in Paris or Bangkok (both 11%).

The second question is how to make the most of the roadspace available. The aim, Ms Tiwari points out, is to “move more people, rather than more vehicles”. Given a lane of their own, buses can carry up to 25,000 people per hour, according to the BRT’s operator, whereas a car lane can move only 3,000 people per hour.

Over three-quarters of Delhi commutes are less than 10km and 20% are by foot. This seems hard to believe, given Delhi’s size and sprawl. It was already seven cities, beginning with Lal Kot in the eighth century, before the British built New Delhi and the nouveau riche colonised the farmland of Gurgaon. But commutes are short precisely because the city has competing centres of gravity, each orbited by neighbourhoods, markets, offices and slums. The social distance between rich and poor may be vast, but the geographical gap is negligible. After all, someone needs to sweep, cook, chauffeur, launder and babysit for the rich.

In wealthier countries, the rich pay dearly for a short commute; in India’s cities, the poor cannot afford a long one. Even a three-rupee bus fare, which will take you up to four kilometres on a bus without air conditioning, takes a painful bite out of the poor’s earnings. Rickshaw-pullers, bricklayers and street vendors often sleep where they work, curled up under their stall, draped over their rickshaw, or huddled by their construction site. A woman may work as a servant in the morning, then return home to take care of her own children and chores, before travelling to another job in the evening. This is impossible unless she lives near her work.

As the 419 bus nears Old Delhi, cars cease to be its main rivals for road space. It overtakes a cycle rickshaw carrying seven schoolchildren, two of them standing. It must also cede a lane to vegetable-sellers, who display their cauliflowers, carrots, tomatoes and lemons along the route. I see the first pig since Khanpur. The bus terminates shortly after 9am at the railway station, where I restore my energies with a paratha, served on a page ripped from the Sunday Times of India.

In the recent Delhi state elections, the opposition party hoped to convert frustration with the BRT into votes. The party’s candidate for chief minister won his seat. But the ruling Congress party, whose chief minister championed the BRT, won every other seat along the route. Either the BRT is more popular than the Times believed, or car-owners don’t vote.

Tokyo

WITH a population of 35m, greater Tokyo is the world’s biggest metropolitan area. Despite the tyranny of Japan’s shrinking demographics, it will be decades, if ever, before Mumbai or Mexico City dislodges Tokyo’s crown. In the meantime, the scale and efficiency of the city’s diurnal migrations present the sharpest possible contrast between Tokyo and those two competitors.

The railway rules. Every working day a vast ganglia of 45 bullet, main and suburban-overground lines, with another 13 underground, channels 4.1m swipecard-carrying commuters into Tokyo’s central wards alone, with clean and exceptional precision. (The exception to the exceptional will be touched on later.)

Shinjuku station alone disgorges 900,000 passengers each morning, sucking them in again in the evening, some of the men (and they are mostly men) by now inebriated, before dumping them in their distant bedroom towns. Indeed, the commuting sarariman [salaryman]—the selfless company drone, one among a sea of dark suits pushed on to their morning train by white-gloved platform attendants—has as much claim to be Tokyo’s iconic figure as Christ the Redeemer has for Rio de Janeiro.

And almost as misunderstood, a projection of others’ fantasies. Westerners may no longer subscribe so openly to the nonsense of Japanese inscrutability. Still, the commute has become the chief expository site of a variant example of “Japanese exceptionalism”: the notion that society in Japan is governed by subtle but unbreakable social rules, where group-think trumps the individual and automatons replace the freedom-loving and autonomous actors of the West. Somewhere deep in all this lies a tiny seed of truth, but it is too often buried in a bed of bunk.

Japanese social and business interactions are famously not contact sports, but the obvious exception is the rush-hour trains. Don’t assume that Japan’s commuters are somehow better shaped by social norms or the obligations of corporate life to cope with the crowded commute—they are merely long-suffering.

Indeed, a sense of camaraderie that everyone is in this together is not so different from, say, Mumbai, which has its own commuting etiquette: there, travellers are asked to “please adjust” to make space in a crowded carriage for one more. Yet a new commuter in Tokyo very quickly learns from the sharp exchanges and even fisticuffs that, at the peak of the morning rush, the tension is just below the surface, and short fuses can be lit by one shove too many. For any visitor with the common complaint that Tokyo’s citizens are inscrutably, unnervingly polite, this reporter has the antidote: board the Yamanote line at Ikebukuro at 7:45 on any weekday morning.

Outside the rush hours, travelling offers both social observation and the time to spin a theory out of it. Recently, a visiting English philosopher at Tokyo University wrote a book about his year in Japan that was entertaining—mostly intentionally. But during one late-evening commute home he notes an impossibly beautiful young woman hanging, fast asleep, from the strap. He marvels at the woman’s ability, in a split-second, to go from a sleeping state to striding off the train at her stop. And he puts such “subliminal attentiveness” to something very deep in the nature of the Japanese: “a pervasive and acute alertness to their environment and its most subtle signals, instilled perhaps by their constant vulnerability to earthquakes.” Or perhaps, as one Tokyo-based reviewer suggests, she just heard the station announcement.

The trains are run with a uniformed professionalism and an esprit de corps that put even the Swiss in the shade. Only earthquakes or a terrorist attack have the potential for major disruption (the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attack on the underground in 1995 killed a dozen commuters and railway staff).

On the other hand, jinshin jiko (literally, “human-body accidents”) cause many lesser disruptions each year. These are the “jumpers”: those driven by depression, or by shame from losing their job or accruing debts, to throw themselves in front of an oncoming train. This aspect of Tokyo mores, at a time when suicides may be expected to rise as the economy slumps, is curiously underexamined.

Indeed, the train companies have got the business of cleaning up the mess down to a fine art, sometimes in less than 15 minutes, while commuters are handed excuse-notes to show their employers. Meanwhile, the grief of the deceased’s family is heightened by having to bring a perverse kind of blood money—up to ¥3m ($34,000) as compensation to the railway company.

Every year 2,000-plus train chikan, or perverts, are arrested for groping women and schoolgirls—the vast majority during the morning rush hour, causing minor delays. For years, females just put up with the indignity of groping, either out of embarrassment or out of fear that their claim would not be taken seriously. But habits are now changing, and women will hold up the offender’s hand and shout “Chikan!”. Several lines also have women-only carriages for peak hours. A few men’s lives have been broken because of false accusations.

Many male commuters are huge consumers of manga, and flick lazily through rapes and other sadistic humiliations of women. As elsewhere, a debate rumbles on in Japan about whether such pornography excites deviant behaviour or diverts it. Certainly, a strong vein of erotic fantasy, with deep draughts of sado-masochism, runs just beneath the order of Japanese society. Yet rates of sexual crime are astonishingly low. Meanwhile, some schoolgirls also indulge openly in their own brands of manga, depicting graphic if less violent sexual fantasy.

The only thing that can be said with confidence is that Japan has found original ways to make money out of people’s sexual predilections. Little more than a stone’s throw from the huge Shibuya station is the “Shibuya Pink Girl’s Club”, which on its varied menu offers a chikan densha, or pervert train.

The “groper’s course” starts at ¥12,000 ($130), where the connoisseur picks out from the menu the girl of his choice, dressed either as a schoolgirl or office receptionist. This girl then beckons him through the window of a mock-up train carriage, which not only broadcasts station announcements, but even shakes and rattles. For the next 45 minutes the connoisseur is under no risk of arrest as he gropes to gay abandon—before joining the slumberers on one of the last real trains home.

Homer

TEMPERATURES have spent a long time below zero this winter in Homer, Alaska, a coastal town of about 5,000 people. In such conditions, having a car is less a luxury than a part time job. There are the studded winter tires to put on, the engine-block heater to plug in, and the emergency supplies—sleeping bag, water, food, matches—to pack before a trip up the highway, where drivers can find themselves dozens of miles from the next gas station or house.

Homer sits on Kachemak Bay, a 60 kilometer-long inlet of the Pacific. On the bay’s far side, snow-strung mountains rise out of the sea. The town doubles in size in the summer with the arrival of salmon and good weather. There’s only one traffic signal here, and locals know high season has arrived when turning left across traffic at every other intersection becomes nearly impossible. But in the winter, life here is dark and close.

Recently, near-hurricane-force winds ripped through Homer, pelting the area with rain and bolting us out of our deep freeze. The storm knocked out the local radio station. Alaska is one-fifth the size of the rest of the United States, but has only one radio engineer. It was days before he arrived with the necessary parts.

For much of the year, the morning commute begins in the dark with the unavoidable chore of scraping the windshield free of snow and ice. During a recent deep freeze, cars and trucks idled along the roads, left to warm up for ten or fifteen minutes before a short commute across the town. The exhaust pooled in the cold, still air. Because garages are expensive to build and hold heat poorly, they are rare. Every morning during the school year, a line of vehicles heads into town behind the school bus, which stops frequently and flashes a strobe light from its roof into the darkness.

Recent rain turned frozen gravel roads into sheets of ice and melted all of the snow, revealing half a winter’s worth of blown trash and dog waste lining the roads. Winter along Alaska’s more temperate coast bucks residents from freeze to thaw and back again.

Before I leave the house, I stretch rubber and metal ice cleats onto my boots. Car (or more often truck) is king in Alaska. The state developed after automobiles gained prominence, and space is rarely a limiting factor. Like most of Alaska, Homer has no public transportation, but three different taxi companies maintain fleets of four-wheel-drive cabs. People are suspicious of pedestrians, figuring they either are mentally unfit to drive or have recently been arrested for drunk driving.

When oil prices shot up last year, we Alaskans felt it deeply. Although Alaska is an oil producing state, petrol prices were far higher here than in the rest of the country. But the state government—funded almost entirely by oil and petrol taxes—was flush. On top of the annual payment of oil and petrol revenues Alaskans receive, we each collected an extra energy “rebate” payment, for a total of about $3,200. As Sarah Palin boasted of her fiscal conservatism on the campaign trail, we patted our wallets and smiled. Then we paid the fuel bill.

Alaska’s relationship with petroleum remains sticky. Thousands of barrels of oil—around 11.7% of the country’s daily consumption—are pumped out of the ground here each day, while Alaska, like other northern regions, feels disproportionately the impacts of climate change brought on by burning these fuels.

We see these impacts daily. Glaciers visible through living room windows recede up mountain valleys. Warmer temperatures fueled a beetle epidemic that leveled the region’s spruce forests in a decade. In villages on eroding coastlines up north, houses topple into the sea.

But wildlife thrives around Homer. Moose lumber across local roads, stopping traffic. In the spring, cow-moose drop calves in backyards, and black bears dash across streets and gardens, then topple trash cans looking for food. Last winter, a pack of wolves picked off a few pet dogs not far out of town.

On a short walk from a residential section to the main drag in Homer, I pass dingy multi-unit houses and single-family suburban homes separated by forested lots. For now, the economic slump may leave these patches of woods unbothered. Alaska is a fresh canvas on which the United States is repainting many of its old mistakes. But it still contains vast tracts of undeveloped terrain where, for now at least, we can be reminded of the land without us.

Adhiraj

Free Buses, Cheaper Subways -- and a Solution to New York's Traffic

by Charles Komanoff
February 9, 2009 http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/fea/20090209/202/2821

Photo (cc) Pete Biggs

Last spring, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed an $8 "congestion fee" to drive into parts of Manhattan, the plan fell victim to several intrinsic weaknesses. Geographical inequity, for one: Manhattan residents and New Jersey drivers would have ponied up a lot less than car commuters from Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. Lack of ambition, for another: The promised 6 percent drop in midtown gridlock seemed a meager reward for ending free use of city streets and bridges.

But the basic idea is a good one, as experience in London, Stockholm and Milan has shown. Can "congestion pricing done right," as new State Sen. Daniel Squadron has called for, fix the Bloomberg plan's flaws? With a smarter plan, can we make a serious dent in traffic tie-ups that by some estimates cost the city $13 billion a year, while creating so many winners that the plan survives the legislative gauntlet?

What This Plan Would Do

Here's one possibility:

• Replace the mayor's flat $8 toll to drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street with a sliding scale of charges. All cars and trucks trips driving across 60th Street from the north or entering midtown or lower Manhattan via a bridge or tunnel would pay a fee, but it would vary, from $10 during weekday peak hours down to $2 at night and much of the weekend. The charge would be at least twice as effective in unsnarling traffic as the mayor's $8 flat fee yet would average less -- around $6.
• Since all vehicles contribute to congestion, all vehicles pay: no "offsets" for other tolls paid by drivers from New Jersey, no matter how much they paid to cross the Hudson, and no exemptions for "black cars" driven into Manhattan to pick up or drop off their largely well-off clientele. For medallion cabs, which circulate a great deal within the "cordon" without crossing it, a surcharge on fares gives an equivalent effect.
• Dedicate the revenues from the congestion toll and taxi surcharge to eliminate bus fares (which will speed boarding), make trips within the city on Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North commuter trains free (which will help ease subway crowding), and cut subway fares.

This plan originated with Ted Kheel, the lawyer and civic activist who, for the past two years, has sponsored a research program to realize his hope of making car travel more efficient and mass transit more affordable by integrating the two systems. Kheel's foundation, Nurture New York's Nature, has funded development of a computer model -- the "Balanced Transportation Analyzer" -- that predicts how the new tolls and fare incentives will alter commuter behavior and calculates the resulting changes in travel speeds and agency revenues.

The analyzer is firmly grounded in empirical evidence. For example, to calculate how many auto commuters would shift their trip from the 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. morning peak, when the $10 toll would apply, to the 5a.m. to 6 a.m. hour, when the toll would drop to $4, the analyzer draws on data about drivers' actual time-shifting after the Port Authority instituted time-variable pricing in 2001. The same approach lets us estimate that a variable subway fare topped off at $1.50 during the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. rush hours and tapering down before and after would cut subway ridership during those two rush hours while increasing it at less crowded times.

The analyzer is now making the rounds of the regional transportation agencies. No less an authority than "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, the former chief traffic engineer for New York City and the dean of his profession, has pronounced the model "comprehensive, logical and the best I've seen."

Run this new congestion-pricing plan through the analyzer, and the numbers are striking. Charge a 24/7 congestion price varying from $2 to $10 and increase taxi fares by a third, and the resulting revenue could allow the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to halve the average subway fare and make all other transit inside the city, including buses and commuter trains, free. The combined carrot and stick will increase the number of people traveling into the heart of the city while reducing the number of cars. This would improve daytime traffic speeds by an average of 20 percent in Manhattan south of 60th Street and provide sizeable improvements on the approaches from the boroughs and New Jersey.

To be sure, our plan won't cure the inherited MTA deficit. Other proposals have been advanced to do that, such as the one proposed by the Ravitch Commission last fall. A "Kheel-Komanoff" plan, however, could be powerfully merged with a deficit-plugging plan, enhancing it in crucial ways. Indeed, the Ravitch plan, which may be adopted in some form this spring, is fully compatible with our model. The small -- and controversial -- portion of that plan that calls for geographically biased bridge tolls would be replaced by the Kheel-Komanoff universal toll and taxi fee. (Note to residents east of the East River: Under the Ravitch plan, which calls for bridge tolls, alone, you would account for 60 percent of all fees collected. That falls to 36 percent under Kheel-Komanoff, which spreads the burden among more drivers.)

The merged plan could keep the payroll tax Ravitch recommends as well as his calls for greater efficiency and transparency at the MTA. If additional monies are needed to fund the authority's capital budget, these could be drawn from the congestion-pricing pot by deferring some of the drop in subway fares. The provision for free buses should be inviolate, however, because many poorer New Yorkers rely on buses and they are a mainstay in communities underserved by subways.

Our plan benefits everyone, including drivers, who will pay more but get a faster and more reliable commute in return. The biggest beneficiaries may be bus riders. The free fare will not only stretch their paychecks but also speed their trips, since no one will have to stop and swipe a Metrocard to get on board. New Yorkers would see overall time savings running into billions of dollars, not to mention fewer car crashes, healthier air and an improved quality of life.

Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Paterson, MTA Chairman Sander, fellow New Yorkers: That traffic plan you've been waiting for? It's right here.

Charles Komanoff, an independent policy analyst, is president emeritus of Transportation Alternatives and a founding trustee of the Tri -State Transportation Campaign.

A friend who works for the Department of Transportation in the city of New York whose job title is a very promising "Division of Planning and Sustainability" is asked me the following question which I would like to share with you:

“I am trying to gather as much data on shared space streets (e.g. “home zones”, “woonerven”, “pedestrian-priority streets”) as I can to make a pitch for adopting them here.  Our engineers are ok with the idea in concept, but need more backup information to be convinced.  I’m doing a lot of research for data, studies and photos on their use in big cities around the world.  A lot of the photo examples I have now are from small cities around Europe, rather than, say, U.S. cities and large European or international cities like London, Paris, etc.  Do you happen to have any photos of various kinds of shared space designs in Paris or other large cities in Europe (or even American cities)?  Even better, do you know of any good research/reports/data on the subject, particularly safety studies of existing implementations in Paris or elsewhere?”

It would be much appreciated if you could post your answers to the New Mobility Café (NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com) with a copy to Mike Flynn

at mike@....  And if we start to have an interesting collection, perhaps Mike and I can edit it into a background document for all.

Thanks for digging into this if you have the time and taste.

Best/Eric

                     Ideas from the New Mobility Partnerships 

                   Technology transforms time and space

                                                . . . and our minds

The New Mobility Agenda – http://www. newmobility.org

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      T:  +331 4326 1323  or  +339 7044 4179   Skype: ericbritton

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John Adams [mailto:john.adams@...]

From: Dave Holladay [mailto:tramsol@...]
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 6:47 AM
To: mike@...; eric.britton

Whilst not a total home zone project the 20mph speed limit represents

the sort of first step on the way and can also be applied as a blanket

limit on all streets in an area, with a minimum of expenditure, and an

economy of scale (signs bought in bulk have lower unit costs)  - Rod

King in Warrington - also active in the Warrington Cycle Campaign a

group you should remember from giving a presentation in NYC for their

Crap Cycle Lanes book - now well into its reprint and still raising

money for the UK Cyclists' Defence Fund - well Rod runs 20's Plenty for

us.  Rod's e-mail is  < rodk@...  >

In terms of bangs per buck area wide schemes in Hull and Portsmouth have

slashed fatal and serious injury rates, and for a bargain price  - the

Portsmouth scheme cost just £400  (around $580) per street.  The schemes

can be enforced if the ||Transport department of the Administration and

local bus (transit)  operators join with their support.

In Hull all of Peter Shipps buses (E Yorks Motor Services) are committed

to keeping to the 20mph limit in 20 mph areas, and effectively work as

mobile speed regulators (as it is difficult to drive a car fast with

every bus keeping their speed down.  Add in the trash compactor trucks

and street service vehicles and soon you'll have over 50% of the motor

traffic holding down the speed of that 5% who won't observe the law.

Keeping speeds down is also good business for a transit operator - One

UK bus operator with a London Buses contract used the Euro4 engine

management system to regulate the top speed (but, thanks to the

electronics, not the engine performance) to the 30mph maximum on the

route over which the buses operated - results included less driver

stress (running late - not worth taking chances as the bus won't go

faster than 30mph) and fewer minor crashes and speed related damage. 

All-in-all a simple but effective 'green policy'*

My definition of a green policy is one with a lot of green policy

documents - green coloured ones that is - I believe yours come  in units

of $1 upwards.

I liked the story from Gil Penalosa in New York last summer about touring the Park Avenue

closure with the Commissioner for Transport, when up comes the

Commissioner for Parks (on a bike of course) full of enthusiasm and

saying this was the best event he'd seen in NYC in 40 years!

Dave Holladay

A quick note to inform you that we will be publishing each of the contributions to the "Messages for America" project on our New Mobility Think Pad blog, and that as they are logged in they will automatically be copied as well to the New Mobility Café for your information and eventual reference.  So if you are not logged into the café, this may be one reason to encourage you to do so.  Of course each of these contributions will be found in the compendium which is located at www.messages.newmobility.org

I am doing this because I want them to get the broadest circulation possible, because we have a world that is badly in need of good new ideas in our sector.  As opposed to the contents of our messages under these various discussion groups, those that appear on the blog are picked up by Google and the other search engines and hence make more broadly known.

I hope you find some use in this and of course if you have ideas for new profiles or authors, we still have two weeks to get them into shape for publication.

Dear Alok,

I could not agree with you more.  And I could not disagree with you more.  (It makes me think of that old definition of what intelligence is: the capacity to keep in one’s mind two directly contradictory ideas without your head exploding.”

I will not load you down here with fine detail my arguments for what I call "free" public transport --  which may at first glance appear to be a very minor (but is in fact a highly significant) difference. 

Should it interest you however you can find a brief summary of my views on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-fare_public_transport#Perception_and_analysis.  For what it is worth. 

And in fact I reasonably competent that if we thought this one through sufficiently together, we would find ourselves with a very high degree of agreement on this.

But for that either you have to come to Paris or figure out how to get me to Hong Kong.

Very best wishes,

Eric Britton

PS.  And I must say that I like the way in which our New York city friends are teasing this concept to see how they can take the fundamental principles behind it and put them to work.  You also may find some value in the ongoing discussions of the National Journal Transportation Panel in response to the question “How Will We Pay For The Transportation System We Need?” which you can pick up at  http://transportation.nationaljournal.com/2009/02/how-will-we-pay-for-the-transp.php.  It will be interesting to see how this question fair since we have an audience which is not only generally well-informed informed but also charged with hands-on responsibility for finding out how to pay for that  “transportation system we need".  I invite us all to stay tuned and if any of you have contributions that you would like to add to the National Journal panel, send them on and I will see if and how we might integrate them into discussions.

"Free Public Transport", howsoever tempting it sounds, is never the solution because

- it promotes non-necessary consumption;
- no incentive for upkeep and service quality;
- lack of psychological pressure of demanding a good quality service;
- loss of perceptive value.

Instead, the focus should be on delivering "value for money". It creates much greater customer satisfaction and promotes higher usage. We should not attempt to brand public transport as "cheap" (i.e. something that should be used only by those who can't afford anything better) but as "trendy" (i.e. something fashionable which all should strive to use).

We need to bring Public Transport out of populist political trap and make it a top-of-the-mind sought after product.

Cheers,
Alok Jain
Hong Kong