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Heavy traffic on the way to sustainable cities and sustainable lives. . .

The Planet’s Sustainable Transport Newspaper.
Welcome in an information-overload age to World Streets: the 21st century weekly newspaper that has a single job: to provide our world-wide readers with high quality, readable, concise information, food for thought, surprises and leads specifically on the topics of sustainable mobility, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, world-wide.

World Streets is an independent, internet-based collaborative knowledge system specifically aimed at informing policy and practice in the field of sustainable transportation, and as part of that sustainable cities and sustainable lives. We want to make sure that World Streets is a good read, and a fast one, for our overloaded colleagues working on these issues in cities and countries around the world, as well for others trying to follow the full range of issues involved.

Shared space:

We decided back in late 2008 to create up a wide-open world-wide public shared space on the web for friends and colleagues around the world working at the leading edge on these challenges, giving them a congenial platform to develop and share the best of their experience, ideas, strategies, materials, reflections, stories, tools, images, evidence about better (and worse, since we can learn from them too) ways of making use of what Jan Gehl calls “The space between buildings”.

From the beginning, we were interested in challenging main line thinking (or lack thereof) that in most places constitutes, for better or worse, the principal backdrop to policy decisions and investments in the sector. And in all this we were not trying to come up with and sell to all comers some sort of “unified theory of sustainable transport” — but rather to encourage greater variety of thought, more vigorous debate and efficient exchanges, on the grounds that the best ideas, once sufficiently well stated and backed by real world proof, will be the ones that win out.

Our ultimate goal in this was simple enough: we wanted to do our bit to create and support a new majority and in the process redefine the politics and practice of transport in cities around the world.”

Four functions:

World Streets is part of a larger program with four main functions and objectives: (a) It is a specialized weekly journal. (b) An open collaborative international network. (c) An in-depth international resource. And finally (d) an active lobby for sustainable transportation, sustainable cities and sustainable lives, supporting projects and programs all over the world. You can see more on this by clicking here for a fast-read presentation of the program’s high points – World Streets in brief.

World Streets adds new dimensions to the New Mobility Agenda, offering an extended forum for contributions, challenges and comments reaching beyond the dozen-plus focus group expert fora of the main New Mobility programs (www.program.newmobility.org). Content is regularly provided on a volunteer basis by more than one thousand colleagues actively working on these issues with whom we have taken contact, swapped ideas, and in many ways collaborated since the outset of the New Mobility Agenda in 1988. (With so much spread out activity in so many areas, we figured out that all of us involved needed one place to go for the cream of the crop – and that is World Streets.)

Like all parts of the New Mobility Agenda, Streets has a definite ethical and strategic approach to the issues we address. Some may find us rigid and often quite uncompromising. And so it have to be. You will find more on that here – http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/about/mission/.

Find your way:

To search the archives of the thousand or so articles that have been filed between these covers over the last two years, please see just over to your right quite a handy battery of five one-click search tools to help you do just that. Let’s have a quick look in the order in which you can see them here:

The calendar function allows the readers to check out the posting for any day since start-up on 2 March 2009
You can search the monthly archives with a single click that calls up all the articles posted in that month. Each is described in a few lines, clickable to the full piece.
Searching by categories can be handy too.
You can also search the full W/S archives with a focused Google search.
The final (combined) search engine ponts to the more than two hundred sources to which W/S is at present linked. You will see the full listing of these carefully selected programs and sources in the bottom left resource column.

For introductory background on the volunteer team behind the journal: – http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/the-journal/editorial-team/

Finally, please note that in addition to the content of the journal, you will also find here a considerable battery of tools for researchers, students, the media and others who wish to dig deeper, not only into the content of the journal but also the very large number of programs and sources to whom we are connected. For more on that we invite you go to the Resource section here – http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/the-resource-base/ .

Questions? Suggestions? Pointers? Click here to the Contact information. We answer our mail.