Playing around with streets

Fun, art and gleeful spontaneity in the streets feature in this delightful and inspiring 20 min talk. The playfulness here is not just in the streets but with the streets.

Ted Dewan at euroGel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

The potential highlighted here for life in streets is in total and utter contrast with the automobile dependent landscapes in my post below.

Ted Dewan is the pioneer of 'road witching'. Towards the end of the video he makes some connections with David Engwicht's 'mental speed bumps'. David also promotes safety through intrigue and uncertainty. Ted's talk also mentions the emerging possibilities of Shared Space. All of this is about reclaiming at least some of our street space as public realm again. It is about treating streets as places not highways.

Do you think these ideas are relevant in the rest of the world, outside rich western cities? I think so.

Hat tip to the wonderful How We Drive blog.

Comments

Help improve this map of global sustainable transport advocates

I am working to map global "sustainable transport" advocates (for want of a better phrase). You can help! Submit suggestions or corrections via this google form . Here is the map so far. Please explore it and help me improve it.

Heavyweight champions for better buses

Many cities strive for better public transport. But too few do enough to improve their BUS systems. For Reinventing Transport this time around I discussed bus improvements with public transport planning veteran, Colin Brader of ITP. Colin has worked on numerous public transport projects around the world and is one of the authors of the 2019 EBRD report, " Driving change: reforming urban bus services ". A key point in our discussion: Cities need bus reform champions. We will see that one even has a bus improvement "heavyweight". Scroll down for highlights of our conversation or listen with the player below. Click here to learn how to subscribe to this podcast. Yangon bus stuck in traffic. Yangon has made drastic bus reforms recently. Colin Brader is the founder of the UK-based international transport consulting firm, ITP , and is currently ITP’s Chairman. For more than 2 decades he has worked through ITP on projects that have tran...

Transport-based City Types and their Trajectories

I want to help you get perspective on your city and its transport system with the help of simple city types based on their dominant transport modes, such as Walking Cities, Transit Cities, Bus Cities, Motorcycle Cities and Car Cities. This way of thinking about cities is a heuristic (an imperfect mental model or technique that is nevertheless good enough to be helpful). And it obviously is imperfect. For example, real cities often have various modes of transport, and modern cities are really all some kind of hybrid city type. But it is still useful, especially if we add the idea of a Traffic Saturated City , which is a very different beast from a Car City. It is important for change-makers in Traffic Saturated Cities to be aware they are not in automobile dependent cities yet. Options for digesting this: Read the brief article below and study the diagrams. They complement the podcast. For more depth, LISTEN to the 37 minute audio w...

Reinventing Transport

Search This Blog