Reinventing Transport

For the last year or two, most of my work (and blogging) has focused on parking (see the  Reinventing Parking blog  or on facebook ). But now I also want to revive this neglected blog and to use it to stay mindful of what really motivates my work (including the parking work). So what exactly is it that motivates my transport policy work? The statement below is an attempt to capture what I am trying to achieve as clearly as I can. A  mission statement  for my professional life, if you like. Yikes. You will see signs of these motivations throughout this blog, its predecessor , in my tweeting  and in much of my professional writing .  I aim to help cities, towns and streets unleash greater success, equity and conviviality  by focusing more on transport's 'ends' (such as  placemaking , accessibility and mobility ) than its ' means ' (such as  vehicles and traffic ) and  by enhancing choice  and choice-making i...

Freely flowing traffic is a good thing, right? And affordable motoring is good too, isn't it? Most motorists in most cities would surely agree. Maybe you would too? But as citizens and voters I think we need to be careful what we wish for. When political leaders decide that the central goals of urban transport policy are 1) solving traffic congestion and 2) keeping driving affordable, they may make themselves popular with motorists, but they also risk gradually turning their city into a monster.  I argued along these lines in a talk I gave on Wednesday to a couple of hundred junior college (high school) students (the presentation is at the end of this post). It was a non-technical talk on basic priorities in urban transport planning. Below is part of my reasoning. The Los Angeles region is not the world's most automobile-dependent city but it is the only mega-city to try so hard to keep driving fast and cheap. When faced with traffic problems it is tempting to ju...

What is "success" in urban transport policy? A common answer used to be "keeping vehicles moving and avoiding traffic jams". But by now, most people involved with urban transport realise that "keeping the traffic moving" is NOT a useful goal. Mobility, especially mobility for vehicles, is just a means to other ends. It should never be seen as an end in itself. If we make preventing congestion our goal, we are confusing ends with means. OK. So what is the real goal of urban transport planning then? Most of us tend to answer " accessibility "! Planning for accessibility involves trying to make it easy to REACH the things we want to (like contacts, services, goods, jobs, education). This seems like progress. Here we have a much more coherent purpose for transport planning, right? Unfortunately, accessibility doesn't seem to excite many people. Despite decades of lip service to accessibility planning most cities still have way too m...