Dear readers,

for years it was common to say that in a modern society everybody needs access
to a car. Now I read that in Germany one in ten does not want to have a car
which is a quite remarkable number. Only one third of the car free households
said that they cannot afford a car.

This changing in the people's views means that a car is not considered as a
status symbol any more.

Now, my question is whether anybody has some information about the situation in
the eastern European countries? There, people could not afford a car for long
and still it is seen as an expression of extravagance. I suppose there might
also be a movement towards more ecological mobility but it has much less power
than in other countries. The eastern European countries now have the great
chance not to repeat the same mistakes as we did in the 60's and 70's in western
Europe. How great is the opportunity that they may learn from other people's
mistakes than making their own?

René Schönemann

> This changing in the people's views means that a car is not considered as
> a status symbol any more.

There has been a saying that has been used to explain how our society got so
structured for cars, not people:

"There are two kinds of people.  Those who own cars, and those who wish they
did."

Now there is a change in this, due to frustrations, and we get a chance to
test out a variation of the saying:

"There are two kinds of people.  Those who can live without a car, and those
who wish they could."

This new reality/sensibility might be the basis for finding a coalition for
returning our communities to walk-first, all-inclusive, clean, quiet
environments.

Chris Bradshaw
@ottawalk

Dear All,

Please find the following Call for Papers forwarded on behalf of Sue
Hendrickson

Erel



The Transportation Research Forum 51st Annual Forum

Washington DC, USA | 11-13 March 2010

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE - 15 DECEMBER 2009

>> Submit abstracts now at: www.trforum.org


The 2010 Conference Themes include:

-          Transportation in an Era of Economic Challenges
-          Sustainable Transportation
-          Transportation and Energy
-          Transportation Policy in the 21st Century
-          Challenges in Truck, Port, Transit, Intercity Rail and Air
Transportation

Conference Highlight......

Fred Smith, Chairman, President & CEO of Fedex Corp. a global
transportation, business services and logistics company. Since founding
FedEx in 1971, Smith has been an active proponent of regulatory reform, free
trade and "open skies agreements" for aviation around the world. Most
recently, he has advocated for vehicle energy-efficiency standards and a
national energy policy. He was formerly chairman of the Board of Governors
for the International Air Transport Association and the U.S. Air Transport
Association. Smith is a member of the Business Roundtable, the CATO
Institute and is co-chairman of the Energy Security Leadership Council. He
is the chairman of the French-American Business Council.


CALL FOR PAPERS

To submit your paper, panel or poster session information please visit
www.trforum.org<http://www.trforum.org/> and follow the session links.

Abstract submission deadline is 15 Dec 2009

For further information visit: www.trforum.org or contact the Conference
Secretariat

Sue Hendrickson at info@...<mailto:info@...>
Phone +1 (701) 231-7766


This email was independently scanned for viruses by McAfee anti-virus
software and none were found

Sincerely,
Todd Alexander Litman
Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org)
litman@...
Phone & Fax 250-360-1560
1250 Rudlin Street, Victoria, BC, V8V 3R7, CANADA
“Efficiency - Equity - Clarity”

Doors of Perception Report
November 2009
In Halifax with Antigonishts

**** **** **** **** ****THIS MONTH'S HIGHLIGHTS Four Days in Halifax - - The
Antigonish Movement - - Citizen Assemblies - - Doomer Trades - - Ecological
Stewardship - - Spacing - - Lifeboat Workshops - - The Hub - -  The Hots - -
Urban Forests - - Power Without Energy -- Smart Grids as Social Grids - - The
New Economics - - Design and the Green Economy - - Melons We Can Believe In
**** **** **** **** ****

FOUR DAYS IN HALIFAX
I went to Nova Scotia for "Four Days Halifax" - a time-compressed mini-festival
whose aim was to help the city  get its hands muddy in a green economy. One
quickly felt the influence of Moses Coady, a key figure in the cooperative
movement in Atlantic Canada and founder of the Antigonish Movement during the
30s and 40s. Coady, who helped small, resource-based communities, was a pioneer
of what today is called asset-based community development. It's an approach
which advocates the use of skills and resources that are already present within
the community, rather than relying on help from outside. Until the global
crisis, this philosophy was thought to be most relevant  in developing countries
- but we are all emerging economies now. Many of Coady's innovations in  adult
education, co-operatives, and microfinance could surely be dusted off and
re-purposed for Halifax today.
http://coadyextension.stfx.ca/people/leaders/moses-coady/

TIME COMPRESSING SOCIAL INNOVATION
Our starting point in Four Days was that many elements of a resilient Halifax
already exist in embryonic form - but not all of them are visible in their own
backyard. The most important preparation work was to identify these local
assets. Peter Wuensch and Rachel Derrah from Breakhouse, a Halifax a design
firm that's headed strongly into social innovation, and Joanne Mackenzie and
Sera Thompson from The Hub Halifax, duly rounded up some inspiring people
and projects.
http://4days.ca/

ONLY CONNECT
Our next step was to figure out what practical steps might help these projects
improve and multiply. First off, we kick-started five "social innovation
charrette" teams from Nova Scotia College of Art + Design (NSCAD).
Next, we did a Dragon's Lair event in which social enterprise start-ups pitched
their case for investment to local entrepreneurs; the pitchers included a
car-share start-up, and a chef with a roof-top herb garden. The next evening,
a local team staged a mini TEDx conference. This was followed by a Four Days
workshop for politicians, officials and business people. Friday night there was
a Pecha Kucha in which, inter alia, the design student teams reported back.
The final event was a street party where we exchanged stories
about who we'd met and what steps needed to be taken next.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianlarter/sets/72157622524944577/

CITIZEN ASSEMBLIES
One of the TEDx speakers was Peter McLeod. Inspired by Canada's first Citizens'
Assemblies, Peter is out to "reinvent public consultation" and develop a new
provincial-municipal approach to collaborative decision-making. His group is
developing Citizens' Reference Panels whose work can vary from a weekend-long
learning process that produces new understanding and strategic direction - to a
year-long process that can reach difficult decisions with popular support and
produce a clear mandate for public action.
http://www.masslbp.com/people.php

COMMUNITY COLLEGE DELIVERS DOOMER TRADES
Peak-oil doomers are fond of publishing lists of the skills that will have value
when industrial civilization has collapsed: blacksmithing, hat-making,
baby-delivering, that kind of thing. The effect of such lists is to increase the
anxiety of those - such as this writer - who are stronger, to put it mildly, on
theory than on practice. So I was thrilled by our visit in Halifax to Nova
Scotia Community College [NSCC]. This remarkable organization trains 25,000
students a year in a wide array of life-critical skills: cooking, energy
sustainability engineering, ecotourism, truck repair, refrigeration, funeral
directing. NSCC offers 'journeyman diplomas'  to those who successfully complete
an extensive combination of technical training, essential skills education, and
practical experience in a designated trade. But the most inspiring thing of all
about NSCC is its guiding ethos. NSCC's President, Joan McArthur-Blair, told us
that a commitment to ecological stewardship is "not an option, but an
obligation, for every student, teacher and business partner that works with
NSCC". This is remarkable. NSCC is a major teaching and training institution,
heavily linked to industry - and yet sustaining, regenerating, and preserving
the earth's ecosystems are the institution's non-negotiable bedrock.

GREEN TECH TEST-BED
McArthur-Blair took us on a tour of NSCC's new building, the Centre for the
Built Environment. Opening in 2010, this $26m building is unlike unlike any
other trades and technology building I've seen. [My first job was as a
publisher's rep visiting 50 technical colleges a year all over the UK and
Ireland]. The NSCC facility is a live test-bed for green technologies - and for
the skills needed to deploy them. The facility pays equal attention to
ecological remediation and restoration, land conservation, and biomimicry, as
models for energy- and eco-efficiency. The building has been designed so that
five different rooftop photovoltaic panels systems at any one time can be
compared in real-time. Other features include planted rooftops and two huge
interior biowalls, planted from floor-to-ceiling with plants that act as natural
air filters. 50,000 cubic yards (38,000 cubic metres) of industrial debris have
been re-used to create vegetated berms, a bio swale, a retention pond,
a one million litre rock-lined sedimentation pond, landscaped areas,
and gathering spaces.
http://www.nscc.ca/sites/CBE/

SPACING IN
Spacing is an excellent new-paradigm magazine and multi-city blog (Toronto,
Montreal, Ottawa, Atlantic (including Halifax). The blogs feature daily
dispatches from the streets of these places; they with architecture, urban
planning, public transit, transportation infrastructure - just about anything
that involves the public realm of our cities.
http://spacingatlantic.ca/

LIFEBOAT WORKSHOPS
On a visit to Halifax's fabulous farmers market, I met a permarculture pioneer
and teacher called Alex de Nicola. Alex has just launched a programme of
'Lifeboat Workshops' which focus on natural building. Participants build a cob
oven & wall and, in Alex's words, "apply a lot of earth plaster". Among other
workshops are making veggie ferments and growing great garlic.
http://www.novascotiapermaculture.net/?page_id=128

HAPPY ABOUT THE HUB
The Hub Halifax proved a fabulous base from which to run Four Days. The
availability of a well-located space supported by expert and welcoming hosts
brings a region's social ecology literally to life: our residency coincided with
an International Herb Symposium and a B2B Expo, at the World Trade Centre,
which had a particular focus on sustainable business practices.
http://thehubhalifax.ca/

PERPLEXED BY THE HOTS
Something in the Nova Scotia air causes weird buzzwords to breed like crazy.
When I expressed an interest in facilitation skills and training, I soon
received information about groups with names like "Emergent Futures", "Courage
Group", "Genuine Contact"  "Integral Visions", someone (or something) called
"Marquis Bureau"..... and my favourite, "Holistic Organizational Tranformation
Inc" which I have nicknamed The Hots.

TORONTO'S URBAN FOREST
As the effects of climate change and urban heat island continue to escalate,
urban forests can provide essential cooling, shading, pollution sequestration,
and protection from droughts and floods. The city of Toronto has set itself a
target of 35% canopy coverage the City by 2050, but coverage in Toronto
currently stands at 17%, and it has been estimated that it will actually decline
to 10% over the next several years as aging trees deteriorate and die. So the
need to plant trees has never been more urgent.  An organisation called
GreenHere GreenHere works with community stakeholders on a fascinating array
of  tree stewardship and urban forestation projects. I specially like the sound
of their tree stewardship workshops where citizens can learn about everything
from mulching, the planting bean-yielding climbing vines, to making seed bombs
for 'guerilla gardening' of abandoned spaces. GreenHere also trains trainers.
http://www.greenhere.ca/GREENHERE/Reforestation_projects.html

GOOD WORK
I was much impressed by GoodWork ,"Canada's green job site". It connects
passionate, green-minded people with opportunities to contribute and be
employed. Facing reality head-on, the site advises, "rather than compete for
existing, or non-existent, jobs, why not create your own?" There's a ton of
useful information on conservation jobs, stewardship jobs, volunteers, barter,
work exchange and other ways to do good work without having a job.
http://www.GoodWorkCanada.ca/

] OTHER STORIES

PLENTY OF POWER BUT NO ENERGY
Tessa van der Zouwen asks this pertinent question: "Of the total energy usage in
the US in 2007, seven per cent was renewable energy of which just one per cent
came from solar power. Compare this to the fact that in one hour, the sun
provides more than enough energy to supply the earth's energy needs for one
year; and in one day, it provides more energy than the world's population could
consume in 27 years. So if we have a plentiful, universal source of energy �
why
aren't we totally solar powered?" Writing in Material Connexion's newsletter,
van der Zouwen says one explanation is "our, to-date, clumsy and inefficient
(compared to nature at least) methods for harnessing that power". Solar cells
have taken many years to improve their efficiency range from a mere six per cent
in 1954 to 30 per cent by 2007. The article goes on to describe innovations in
the shape of new materials and device structures that are "putting the means for
energy generation in the hands of consumers rather than 'big energy'".
http://www.materialconnexion.com/Home/Matter/MATTERMagazine/TheInfinitePowerofth\
eSun/tabid/702/Default.aspx

A SMART GRID IS A SOCIAL GRID
Echoing van der Zouwen's pointed question about who should best control new
energy systems, a special issue of the Innovations says a "new institutional
structure" is needed if emerging solutions are to be deployed effectively. Nobel
laureate Thomas Schelling, joint editor of the special issue, proposes the
equivalent of a Marshall Plan for energy to coordinate assistance from advanced
industrialized countries to developing countries. Another contributor, Bill
Drayton, founder of Ashoka and of Get America Working, writes that "it makes
no sense to subsidize the use of machines by keeping energy prices low while
penalizing the use of labor through payroll taxes". He urges structural changes
in the economy "to favour people, not things".
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1256325608624/in.pdf

THE NEW ECONOMICS
Measuring success solely in terms of money blinds us to those aspects of wealth
that are not measurable in that way. And the way money is created, bearing
interest - so that debts have to be paid back in a way that demands
unsupportable infinite growth - is a built in driver of unsustainability in the
economic system. What are we to do about an economic system that destroys
the biosphere for economic reasons? What would a politics based on wellbeing be
like? David Boyle and Andrew Simms, authors of an excellent new book, The New
Economics, propose a new approach that turns our assumptions about wealth and
poverty upside down: Real wealth, they explain, can be measured by increased
well-being and environmental sustainability rather than just having and
consuming more things. The book is entertaining, eye-opening and very clearly
written: do read it.
http://www.earthscan.co.uk/?tabid=74731

NOMADIC OBSERVATORY
As urban or peri-rural agriculture becomes more important for our food security,
the fate of un-built urban spaces becomes important. The Stalker Group, based in
Rome, continuously monitors areas around the city's margins and forgotten urban
spaces. Two weeks back they staged an "urban action" to defend left over
agricultural spaces, 'agro romano', not yet been subsumed by speculative
housing development.
http://primaveraromana.wordpress.com/

DESIGN AND THE GREEN ECONOMY: 3.0, TOKYO
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
told the US Congress last week that Japan's debt path was out of control. Simon
warned of "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default". This febrile
situation added energy to the International Design Symposium held to mark
Musashino Art University's 80th anniversary. I gave a new version of my
ever-evolving talk about design and the green economy:
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2009/11/high_entropy_mo.php

On Behalf Of Vinay Baindur
Sent: Friday, 13 November, 2009 07:03

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Stimulus-for-bus-makers-takes-a-curious
-turn/539903/

*Stimulus for bus makers takes a curious turn*
Praveen Kumar Singh, Yogima Seth
Posted online: Nov 11, 2009 at 0226 hrs

*New Delhi*It was a key element of the fiscal stimulus package unveiled in
January, but seems to have got lost in translation. To draw down rising
inventories of commercial vehicles, the Centre had announced a Rs
4,735-crore package for states to buy 15,000 buses for urban transport under
the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

But the urban development ministry’s technical specifications for these
buses and states’ desire for high-tech features have meant that instead of
ridding itself of inventories, the industry is now trying to scale up
capacity. The net effect–the Centre is being forced to extend the deadline
for the buses’ delivery further to March 2010 from the rescheduled date of
December 31, 2009.

“Car sales have improved, but commercial vehicles are picking up slowly.
Most of the 63 cities have asked for low-floor buses, as they are
good-looking and high-tech, irrespective of whether they are suitable for
local roads. The industry is still developing the capacity to supply such
buses, so their delivery will take more time,” heavy industries secretary
Satyanarayana Dash told FE.

“The stimulus measure envisaged the purchase of standard conventional buses.
As a result, bus suppliers like Ashok Leyland and Tata Motors, which had
enough capacity for standard buses, are now developing capacity for
low-floor buses. So it won’t be possible for them to supply the buses before
March 31, 2010,” Dash said.

Ironically, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam) had
alerted the urban development ministry about the industry’s capacity
constraints on low-floor buses as early as February. Yet, the final
guidelines for the buses issued by the ministry asked for high-tech ultra
low-floor (400 mm height) and semi low-floor buses (650-700 mm height).

Though standard buses, with a floor height of 850-900 mm, were also
included, the other technical specifications by the urban development
ministry meant even those couldn’t be delivered fast. Most of the additional
features are standard features in ultra low-floor buses such as audio and
video cameras, vehicle tracking system and integrated common controls. From
Rs 20 lakh a bus, standard buses that meet these tech specs cost over Rs 30
lakh while low-floor buses cost between Rs 45 lakh and Rs 60 lakh.

“The buses being ordered by the states are of all types, low-floor, semi
low-floor and conventional. Within the broad categories, each state and very
often cities within states have their unique specifications,”a Tata Motors
spokesperson told FE.

“Tata Motors has requisite capacity and the company, in any case, is acting
with alacrity to deliver the buses,” the spokesperson added.

According to the latest data, over 11,000 buses have been ordered with
various manufacturers under the JNNURM—over 7,000 are standard buses, while
the rest are in the low-floor category. Of these, a mere 1,500 buses have
been delivered till October, with several hundred standard buses ready but
languishing due to confusion over specifications.

“We are ramping up production at Alwar by 50% from 200 units a month to 300
units a month as well as start manufacturing 200 buses a month at our luxury
buses facility near Tiruchirapalli to cater to the demand from southern
states,” Rajiv Saharia, executive director (marketing), Ashok Leyland, said.


While major players are scurrying to scale up low-floor capacities,
passenger carriers’ sales continue to see negative growth. According to
Siam, sales of medium and heavy passenger carriers declined by 13.1% at
3,424 units in September 2009 against 3,938 units sold in last September.
Sales of light passenger carriers or mini-buses also declined marginally at
2,360 units vis-à-vis 2,384 units in September last year.
On behalf of the industry, Siam has asked the ministry to further extend the
delivery period, in the light of a varying range of specifications to be
met.
--------------------------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: Ranjith Da Silva [mailto:ranjith@...]
Sent: Friday, 13 November, 2009 07:32
To: Gatnet - Gender and Transport Community of Practice
Subject: [GATNET] Gender and Transport workshop - Call for papers

Dear Friends,

Forwarded herewith is a call for papers for the International workshop on
Gender, Economic Integration, and Cross-border Road Infrastructure
Development:
Poverty and Mobility in the Context of Greater Mekong Subregion, scheduled
for May 6-7, 2010 at AIT Conference Center, Thailand.

Thank you.

Kind regards.

Ranjith

Ranjith de Silva
Regional Coordinator or Asia and the Pacific, International Forum for Rural
Transport and Development (IFRTD)
C/o: 319/10, Ramanayaka Mawatha, Erawwala, Pannipitiya 10230, Sri Lanka.

Phone: +94 11 2842972
Fax: +94 11 2856188

Email: ranjith@...

web:
www.ifrtd.org
www.mobilityandhealth.org
www.ruralwaterways.org


  The IFRTD is a global network of individuals and organisations working
together towards improved access, mobility and economic opportunity for poor
communities in developing countries