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A conversation about the past, present and hopeful future of mobility with Eric Britton, long-time mobility consultant & Founder of World Streets.
Eric is an American development economist living in Paris who has been one of the most influential figures in transportation planning and innovation since the 60s, when he was contracted by a consortium of European corporations to figure out how people would move through cities in the future.
We sat down with Eric to learn about his lifetime of pushing for better and more humane systems of urban transportation.
Did you read my 80th note on Facebook? If not, it’s an open letter in which I kind of reflect on my years and — do you know Sir Isiah Berlin, the British philosopher, poet and politician? He talked about the hedgehog and the fox. So, there I was for 80 years being a fox; and the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows just one great thing. And so I decided for the next 80 years I would be a hedgehog.
So as a hedgehog I will concentrate on climate — and in particular the interface between climate and how people get around in their day-to-day lives and move stuff around in their day-to-day lives. So that’s kind of my “expertise” in this.
These were very optimistic times, and technology was a thing in these peoples’ minds that was somehow going to save and solve everything. And I was the guy who ended up saying no, that’s not the way it’s going to work.
The first large-scale study I did in this was titled New Technology in Transportation 1970—1990, which we can basically summarise to say that mobility innovation will take place within the framework of existing modes of transport; it will be step-by-step innovation.
After cataloguing, conceptualizing and prototyping all sorts of techno-utopias ranging from hydrofoils and carveyor belts to hydrogen fuel cells and mini-monorails, the thing that I went back and told these people was, ‘Look, there will be no technological hero on a shiny chrome white horse’.
I realised that none of these technologies was going to solve the problems of cities, not in Europe, not in the Western World, nor anywhere else in the developing world. The future was not going to be defined by some deus ex machina solution to all of our problems, but rather step-by-step innovations and improvements to the tools we already had to work with.
Definitely. I mean, these were very optimistic times, and technology was a thing in these peoples’ minds that was somehow going to save and solve everything. And I was the guy who ended up saying no, that’s not the way it’s going to work. There will be no great piece of technology coming in and saying “that’s it, no problem whatsoever Volvo, go for it.”
I wrote the section on Innovation in Urban Transport and said that by the end of the 20th century there would be two kinds of cars on the road, SUVs and small electric vehicles, which was not too far off! A decade or two isn’t too bad. So I moved to Paris for that study and have been working on the future of transportation ever since.
I really like the role of the factory as a school, as a university, as a transitional device for people to learn to have intellectual curiosity.
Oh, a number of different long-term consultancy projects trying to help transportation companies think about the future. Scania came along next and said “We’re setting up a new operation in Brazil for buses and trucks. What does the future look like for transport in Brazil?” The outcome was the same message: the future is not mechanistic, you will be able to shape it.
I also came to realise from these projects that the question of mobility was not merely an Economics 101 class, it was not simply an engineering problem — it’s something that involves psychology and culture and vastly different people.
Well, firstly, I realised that to depend on any one technology for urban mobility would be to deny human nature itself. We’re just too strange messed up for that — it doesn’t work. I’m American, but I’ve lived in Paris for decades now. And you might think that American and French people are all so different from one another, but in reality, if you look at the data about their choices and preferences, you’ll find that French people are much more different from one another than they are from Americans. So there’s no one answer for a city — the solution comes from a constellation of answers.
The question of mobility was not simply an engineering problem — it’s something that involves psychology and culture and vastly different people.
Too often we see infrastructure being geared up to accommodate the worst possible forms of transport — not only in environmental terms but from the simple geometry of a city, too. Huge parts of public space are occupied by vehicles that are being used 2–3% of the time. It has been very clear to many people for decades that this system is broken, and for me this awareness was the first step that led toward the concept of new mobility and the new mobility agenda.
Put simply, new mobility is a departure from that system, it’s a future in which we would all be free to move in the greatest variety of ways, particularly those ways which are safer, more efficient, better for our environment and that function best when many people using them at the same time.
I like what I told Charles for his book, Happy City on this. I told him, ‘We all know old mobility — it’s you sitting in a congested lane, stuck in traffic. It’s you driving for hours looking for a parking spot, devoting a fifth of your income to your car and a chunk of your tax dollars to road improvements, even as the system worsens every year. It’s your kids not being able to walk or bike or, in some cases, even bus to school. New mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled.’
Oh yes. One of the things I really liked about Scania and later Volvo in Brazil was the role of the factory as a school, as a university, as a transitional device for people to learn to have intellectual curiosity.
Previously in Brazil, the reason you went and got a job was because you didn’t happen to have any money, and as soon as you had money you didn’t go to work any more. It’s a pattern. So with this good, clean, egalitarian Northern European idea about the relationship between workers and leaders, it was just a wonderful education in democracy.
Put simply, new mobility is a departure from that system, it’s a future in which we would all be free to move in the greatest variety of ways.
Yes for example, but the important part is — when you finish it are you the same person as when you started it? And by the way, what’re your aspirations for your children? And so you’re moving from societies which are fixed on the map to ones that can adapt with the changing seasons.
The question remains — how can we ensure that people are actually becoming smarter from their work? How can we ensure workers are going into a cycle of learning and doing and learning and doing and learning and doing — rather than learning once and then doing, on repeat, in perpetuity? This is not a trivial part of society. So I wrote a small book for the European Union called New Ways to Work in a Knowledge Economy.
There are so many creative and caring roles that need to be filled in a working democracy — nobody should be out of work, there’s plenty of work to be done, and no one should be sleeping on the streets.