Transportation
A key feature of globalization is that goods travel ever further between production and consumption. Travel distances have also increased for people, as well: as jobs become more highly concentrated in big cities, people must commute longer distances between their jobs and the places they can afford to live. Among the consequences are increasing fossil fuel use for transport and rising greenhouse gas emissions. While the most systemic way to tackle this problem is through policy change at the national and international level (see Resist Corporate Globalization), there are things we can do on the local level as well.
Town-wide "Going Carbon Neutral" campaigns not only push for reduced energy usage and carbon emissions, they also strengthen community. The small town of Ashton Hayes in the UK launched the concept by conducting an audit of the town's energy use, which helped determine which changes would reduce carbon emissions the most. To change their collective behavior, residents launched campaigns and projects – all with a light, festive, guilt-free approach and without government involvement. Since then, many other towns around the world have launched similar campaigns. Learn how to join them here.
Take action
- Launch your own campaign with Ashton Hayes Going Carbon Neutral's guide A Practical Toolkit for Communities Aiming for Carbon Neutrality.
- Learn another perspective on launching a campaign with this guide from the Canadian town of Eden Mills, So You Want to Go Carbon Neutral: It Takes a Village.
- Develop a solid energy strategy for your town covering conservation, electricity, heating, and transportation with Local Energy Scotland's Community-led local energy plan toolkit.
Get inspired
- A participant in Ashton Hayes found that the campaign not only enabled her family to cut their household energy use in half, it also led them to use green construction methods, start a garden, get to know their neighbors better, and participate more in community life. Read about it in The Guardian article My village is going carbon neutral.
- Eden Mills Going Carbon Neutral in Canada focuses on retrofitting buildings, planting trees, and celebrating all behavior shifts, large and small.
Localization doesn’t mean that all goods can or should be produced locally, but when goods from afar are needed, they should be shipped responsibly. Sailboats, once the only means of shipping, are re-emerging as the most responsible way.
Take action
- Become a trainee and sail along with Fair Transport, which trades organic and traditionally-crafted goods, and ships sustainable cargo overseas by wind power alone. Support Fair Transport to maintain and restore classical sailing ships.
- If you are an artist or artisan committed to low-tech, small-scale, hand-made, ecological goods, join the Fifth Empire Company, "a small scale, sustainable alternative to commercial shipping, focusing on environmentally friendly products, heritage handicrafts and the creative arts," for transporting and promoting your work.
Get inspired
- Shipped By Sail, "an environmentally responsible shipping broker and importer of ethically-sound goods" based in the UK, offers both sail-shipped coffee and olive oil, and shipping services.
- Coffee Under Sail: An Alternative Shipping Option, by Shani Meintjes, profiles the construction of a cargo sailing ship in Costa Rica.
- Sailboats Ship Freight to Manhattan for First Time in 60 Years, by Jackie Snow, shares the story of The Vermont Sail Freight Project, which shipped 12 tons of food from Vermont to New York City along the Hudson River.
As authors Paul Tranter and Rodney Tolley point out, "A great paradox of modern times is that the faster we go, the less time we have." On the altar of speed brought about by a modern, high-tech, globalized society, we sacrifice not only our time, but also our personal, collective, social and ecological well-being. Higher speeds demand more energy consumption, produce more pollution, and militate against building human-scale communities. It's time to slow down the pace of life, and there is a budding "slow movement" aiming to do just that. This ranges from slow food to slow money to slow cities and transport. Here we focus on cities and transportation. Quoting Trantner and Tolley again, "More time can be saved by slowing city transport than by speeding it up."
Take action
- Learn about and join the Citta Slow network, a worldwide organization whose goals include "improving the quality of life in towns by slowing down the overall pace, especially in a city's use of spaces and the flow of life and traffic through them."
- Read the Manifesto for 21st Century Slow Cities, and urge your local government to adopt and implement this vision in your town or city.
- To help both decrease the negative impacts of travel and enrich the experience for traveler and host, practice slow when setting off on your next sojourn. Learn more on the What is Slow Travel page of the Slow Movement website.
Get inspired
- The Sloth Club in Japan promotes slow businesses, tourism, alternative currencies, and more. In his talk Slow is Beautiful, founder Keibo Oiwa describes how living at a slow pace is an essential part of place-based cultures, and necessary for well-being and happiness in the modern age, too.
- Citizens of the California city of Berkeley, US, wanted slower streets, and the city's Healthy Streets initiative is providing them. Two miles of streets have been barricaded on one side to reduce traffic and increase access for pedestrians and bicycles. Cars can still use a portion of the street, but can only travel at speeds of 15 miles per hour or less.
While reducing the transportation of goods around the world is one of the main priorities of economic localization, there will always be a need to transport goods locally. Cargo bikes and bike couriers are a low-energy way to fill this need.
Take Action
- Learn How to Build a Cargo Bike from an old bicycle with these downloadable plans from instructables.com.
- Ask your city government to subsidize cargo bikes, following the examples of Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany. To learn more, see Vienna’s cargo bike shares exemplify successful subsidized sustainable transport, by Paige Wolf, and Inside Berlin's Free Cargo-Bikeshare Program, by Rachel Quednau.
Get inspired
- Register of Initiatives in Pedal Powered Logistics highlights organizations using cargo bicycles and tricycles in innovative ways around the world, from India to the Netherlands to Colombia.
- Cargonomia is an urban food distribution hub which uses locally-manufactured cargo bikes to deliver locally-grown food across the entire city of Budapest, Hungary. Check out Local Futures' entry for Cargonomia on the Planet Local library.
- NYC Cargo Bike Collective in the US is a workers' cooperative working towards "the realization of the carbon neutral future of logistics and delivery in New York City and beyond."
- 8 Cargo Bike-sharing Programs in Europe, by Kelly McCartney, links to a variety of cargo bike share models operated by for-profit companies, nonprofits, and governments.
Car-oriented development – roads, shopping malls, big box stores, suburbia, etc. – is environmentally, economically and socially destructive and inimical to strong, vibrant, human-scale local communities. Get involved in the movement to re-orient planning around people, not cars.
Take action
- Check out this toolkit by the Carfree Cities Alliance that includes "information, advice, ideas bank, how-to's and more, designed to guide practitioners in running car-free related campaigns, projects, events and programs," on strategies ranging from traffic-calmed streets, to pleasant neighborhoods, all the way to car-free cities.
- Learn how to make a street car-free with this guide from Shareable.
- For local government officials and citizens alike, use this compact guide from C40 Knowledge Hub on how to achieve a walking and cycling transformation in your city, highlighting the most impactful and effective policy changes and success stories from around the world.
- Read Making Cities More Livable: Ideas and Action, by Debra Efroymson and Ruhan Shama, on how to transition to well-designed cities that are made for people rather than for profit and machines.
- In the US, advocate for policies at all levels of government to promote walking-friendly communities with these actions from America Walks, and join their Walking College, a "leadership program open to anyone in North America looking to hone their skills and knowledge around creating vibrant, safe, accessible communities for all people."
Get inspired
- 'For me, this is paradise': life in the Spanish city that banned cars, by Stephen Burgen, discusses the process and outcomes of banning cars from the city of Pontevedra in Spain.
- Barcelona's car-free 'superblocks' could save hundreds of lives, also by Stephen Burgen, looks at this great example of a major city working to reorient planning away from cars towards human-scale communities.
- The Relevance of Ancient Newari Urban Settlement Patterns to the Global Sustainability Crisis, by Dristy Shrestha and Shail Shrestha, shows how models for car-free futures can be found in car-free pasts, in this case the ancient Newari settlement of Bhaktapur, Nepal.
- The video, Cargo Bikes in Copenhagen, by Streetfilms, shows the widespread use and practicality of cargo bikes in Copenhagen, Denmark as an alternative for transportation of both people and goods.
- In the video, Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking Its city streets back from cars, Vox profiles this city's innovative planning approach for reclaiming streets for pedestrians.
- In the video, Why car-free streets may be here to stay, Bloomberg City Labs looks at how pandemic shutdowns revealed what life could look like without car-clogged streets, and how this positive change could persist.
- Planning Less Car Use, a policy guide by Friends of the Earth UK, shows why urban sprawl needs to be stopped, and outlines the policies needed to achieve a diverse mix of new developments in existing urban areas with high quality public transport, cycling and walking.
- How to achieve a walking and cycling transformation in your city details some of the policies, programs and public messaging that can promote cycling and walking.
- In Localization and Carfree Cities on Local Futures' blog, Debra Efroymson explains why, "By challenging the car, and outdated approaches to transport and urban planning more broadly, we can make great strides in achieving the benefits of localization."
- In the book Carfree Cities and the downloadable Carfree Design Manual, J.H. Crawford offers practical ways to create the carfree city, which "saves energy, preserves the environment, and improves the quality of our lives."
- The Carfree Cities Alliance has assembled an excellent collection of recommended books, publications, articles, films, and podcasts to inspire carfree activism.
- In Ban cars: Why cities are embracing the call for car-free streets, Patrick Sisson explains how "a growing movement is taking aim at motor vehicles in the quest to solve traffic congestion, slash carbon emissions and create more-livable cities."
- In Carmageddon: it’s killing urban life. We must reclaim our cities before it’s too late, George Monbiot shares evidence of how car traffic "breaks up communities, disrupts social life and crushes local cultures", and why reining in cars is the most important step toward creating livable settlements.
- Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism, by Mikael Colville-Andersen, shows how to "re-establish the bicycle as a respected, accepted, and feasible form of transportation" and help planner and designers "push back against the Automobile Age and convince the skeptics of the value of the life-sized city."
- In Slow Cities: Conquering Our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability, and Slaves to speed, we’d all benefit from ‘slow cities’, Paul Tranter and Rodney Tolley demonstrate, counterintuitively, that reducing the speed of travel within cities saves time for residents and creates more sustainable, livable, prosperous and healthy environments.
- In How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?, Kris De Decker of Low-Tech Magazine describes ways to revive the 4,000 year old sustainable technology of sailing ships, the "obvious alternative to container ships, bulk carriers, and airplanes [if] we want to keep traveling and trading globally in a low carbon society."