Sustainable Mobility (Why? Who will benefit?)

Why is it important to find sustainable way to transport people and goods? For any individual, it is not easy to identify the immediate benefits of changing behavior towards sustainable ways of transportation on a personal level. Sustainable mobility is important for combating the climate change and is therefore global in scale and needs conjoined forces. Hence, changing behavioral patterns among citizens toward sustainable mobility is a complicated endeavor. Policy makers (civil servants and politicians) at local levels, together with dedicated mobility associations and other stakeholders need to work together and with a long time-frame.

In recent years planners have been unanimous about the need to stimulate sustainable development of cities throughout the world. With the term “sustainable” scientists mean that the economic development of cities should be self-controlled not to undermine future ability of the urban economy to thrive.

The limits of growth

The myth of our ability to achieve unlimited growth and improve constantly our way of living with the help of technology without effort and without the help of nature stimulated a rapid absorption of energy sources and destroyed in the same time natural mechanisms of energy regeneration like forests.   About two centuries were needed from 18^th (Industrial Revolution) to 20^th century  (First Worldwide Energy Crisis) for people to understand the consequences of this disrespectful behavior. If decision-makers do not control economic development, the global economy will collapse due to the extinction of natural resources and uncontrolled environmental pollution. This raised an ethical question: Do we have the right to enjoy a high quality of living based on uncontrolled development and in the same time compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?

According to IPCC (alarming) Report on Climate Change from 2023 the world must rapidly shift from burning fossil fuels. To be able to do that we need a mix of strategies and transport systems is one of the most important elements to focus upon. Quoting the World Resources Institute, “Drastically cutting emissions will require urban planning that minimizes the need for travel, as well as the build-out of shared, public and non-motorized transport, such as rapid transit and bicycling in cities. Such a transformation will also entail increasing the supply of electric passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles and buses, coupled with wide-scale installation of rapid-charging infrastructure, investments in zero-carbon fuels for shipping and aviation and more.”

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Please reflect in relation to your context:

To manage a behavioral change, we need to consider the local discourse on Climate Change and the need to change behavior. Some context are more skeptic than others and any policy and action aiming towards sustainable mobility need to take account to the local discourse. How does your local discourse look like?

The social aspects of transportation

The ability to move from one place to another is a prerequisite for our existence and well-being. In densely populated cities free land to produce food is scarce and water is not clean. Without transportation we have no social relations: we meet our neighbors and friends on the street when we exit our home or when we travel to their homes. Without transportation there is no economy: people and products must meet each other. Finally without transportation there is also no health: doctors and patients must also be able to reach each other

Sustainable mobility policies

Sustainable mobility policies try to make more use of natural sources of power. The most eco-friendly source of power is human energy. Nature has the ability to vanish the side-effects of producing energy through human bodies, but it cannot absorb the by-products of using machines to produce the necessary energy to move from one place to another.  Walking and cycling undoubtedly lie at the hearth of sustainable mobility policies because if we use our body there is no limit of movement, because there is no impact on the environment.

Besides the positive effect of walking and cycling, sustainable mobility policies are also about stimulating human contact. Car use led to the transformation of modern cities which altered significantly our way of living. Cars transformation social relations of the cities: residents in the big cities stopped to visit their local stores and groceries, stopped to visit their neighbors to learn local news communicating face to face with people they know, instead they use their car to shop at faceless supermarkets. A lonely crowd can easily be manipulated by a political elite. Nowadays, the raise of internet and smartphone use and the fear of virus infection has even more stimulated human-less contact. People who do not know their local social and physical environment are uneducated people with no local identity, uninterested on local affairs and easily influenced by extremists. Human contact lies at the heart of democracy.

On the other side of the spectrum, mobility based on walking and cycling is a not a far-reaching mobility. Local neighborhood stores which cannot offer cheaper products than big supermarkets but they can offer quality and locality can flourish if mobility is based on short-distance trips. Urban planners are trying to divide huge car-oriented cities again to 15 minutes-walking units with local autonomy reinventing the traditional social sense of neighborhoods which got gradually lost due to extensive car use. This urban model is called “15 minutes cities”.

Conclusively, sustainable mobility is not only about protecting the planet, but mainly to reshape car-oriented contactless cities into social, active, human communities.

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Please reflect in relation to your context:

One way to argue on the need of sustainable mobility measures is to relate these activities toward other types of benefits. To what extent is this possible in your context?