Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Get Ready To Sing With Jaime

The former mayor of Curitiba who transformed that city of less than two million people into a sustainability Champ. Mr Lerner tells us that 70% of the garbage has been separated for the past 20 years and his famous double-articulated buses have been copied in 83 cities around the world. Jaime also claims that any city in the world can be improved within 3 years and recommends urban acupuncture for quick results. I totally agree. Provided you don't have Bretton Woods pen-pushers colonising you with crappy transformation programs.

8 comments:

akagugo said...

In Brazil, hmm? I guess that since your letter (about the notorious Triple Shock fallacy) apparently did not go through, and if we wish that this piece of wisdom should not befell deaf ears, the whole experience of Jaime's discourse could be augmented by incorporting a nice song in the background, like Macarena for instance. Who knows...?

akagugo said...

Oh SHOOOT!!! At 05:40, that's exactly the vision I had for Dodoland: combining the central two-way lanes of the carriageway serving only buses, like what is actually being done in, say, Hanau (Germany), with other "ordinary traffic" (meaning without large heavy loads forbidden from city centres and residential areas) routed to wide roads only so as to avert the unfortunate but avoidable accidents like Soreze or RĂ©duit that took so many innocent lives recently) at the sides, not interfering with the bus/metro lanes at all. And the bus/metro lanes circling around cities / urbanised areas, and these small circles forming part of a larger circular network covering the whole island, so that we may at last attract very high value-added industries which are interested in the just-in-time concept (like Porsche)...
Ah, sorry, gotta stop here, I wet my pants.

But the concept of "acupuncture" is simply beyond beauty.

Sanjay Jagatsingh said...

The solutions are there waiting to be implemented. Maybe FRCP feels that it's best he does some good solid work in his next life...

akagugo said...

For fans of Curitiba's very practical model.

akagugo said...

And what about Helsinki's car-free vision?

Sanjay Jagatsingh said...

Enn bon debi me ena gro problem ek sa kalite vizyon la.

Sanjay Jagatsingh said...

Curitiba seems to have gotten rather complacent. But there are important lessons we can learn from its history.

Sanjay Jagatsingh said...

Bean-counter seemed to have discovered the BRT. And 2019 is approaching. Journalists were of course very complacent.