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THINKING HIGHWAYS' EUROPEAN CONGESTION MANAGEMENT THINK TANK

The car gave us our freedom to travel in the mid-20th Century - it's only taken another 50 years or so for it to be on the verge of taking it back. Our cities are choking, our highways and motorways are often gridlocked, the environment is suffering, the economy is taking hit after hit.

So what are we going to do about it?

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Vietnam's premier international event for both road and rail industries

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A CHANGE GONNA COME...

By Kevin Borras, Publishing Director, H3B Media

Three weeks out of the office, four consecutive weekends away from home, eight beds, three continents. My carbon footprint resembles that made by a clown's shoe. My carbon conscience so guilty that it's handed itself in to the environmental police. However, the last two days of my May globe-trekking underlined my trip's raison d'etre and if anything typified our modus operandi. We've said many times that we are not JUST a publishing company, and that we are not JUST an event organiser. We're facilitators. Our Climate Change Think Tank: Transportation's Impacts and Solutions, held at the University of Massachusetts' Mullins Sports Center in Amherst, MA, on 29 and 30 May proved it, not least of all to me.


"This is the first time I've come across an event that recognises the link between the two subjects [transport and climate change]" said one delegate "and not only that it recognises that transportation can offer solutions to its own impacts."


The fact that a small company based in a small, suburban town equidistant between the creeping conurbations of Croydon and Sutton on London's southernmost border were responsible for bringing this groundbreaking event to the USA was, I have to admit, faintly ridiculous. Had no one in the US ever thought to stage something like this before? Clearly not.

"This is a marvellous conference," said Stephanie Kraft, associate editor of one of western Massachusetts' best-read newspapers, the Valley Advocate. "I wish we could have a conference like that, only free for the public, once a month up here. Loads of people are concerned about transportation and energy in this Valley." The Advocate was one of a number of newspapers to give our event some superb coverage, thanks in no small part to the unstinting and unflagging efforts of Thinking Highways' North American associate editor Amy Zuckerman, and her team. Click here for the Valley Advocate article and here for the Daily Hampshire Gazette's coverage which gave us a very nice spot on front page, with a continuation on page 4 next to a story about a White House climate change report.

Journalist Ron Miller got into the spirit of things and made the event the subject of a presciently worded blog. Click here to view

"I hope UMass gives you an honorary degree," said another delegate, "for bringing this important subject to life."

Amy was also largely responsible for putting together the fantastic speaker program. Along with Prof John Collura, UMass' professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the UMass Transportation Center, they used their amazing array of contacts to persuade such luminaries as the Nobel Prize-winning director of the UMass Climate System Research Center, Prof Ray Bradley, Western Massachusetts Congressman John Olver and RITA Administrator Paul Brubaker to make impassioned, thought-provoking presentations.

(Photos by Amy Zuckerman)
Ray Bradley	John Olver	Paul Brubaker

Day one focused on impacts, day two centred on solutions, finishing with a session on the rise of the virtual work place - how the baby boomer generation's new working patterns and habits are having an effect on our climate and not the other way round.

Equally impressive was the radio and TV coverage afforded to our event. Click Here to listen to how Corporate Watchdog Radio reported on our humble little symposium, which was sponsored by Quixote Corporation. We hope to get a link to the public access TV programme that deemed us worthy of a slot on the evening news.

Have we changed anything? Who knows. According to speaker David Schonbrunn, president of the Transportation Solutions Defense & Education Fund, we may not have done but what we have achieved is a certain degree of conscience-pricking. "There's a lot of people in there who are now thinking 'what can I do?' Doing nothing is not an option, now more than ever."

If we've made people think about climate change, then the event was a success. We know what the impacts are. We know what the solutions might be. The success of the event is that we brought them both into the same room at the same time.

Thanks also to David Ahlfeld, Lee Armstrong, Erin Baker, Jeff Brown, David Cash, Rob DeConto, John Fabel, Al Gullon, Catherine Miller, John Mullin, Tim O'Leary, Luisa Paiewonsky, Richard Palmer, Peter Plumeau, Mike Replogle, Tom Strah, Joyce Wenger, Kris Stetson, Crystal Nielsen, Annie Harris-Kornblith and Randy Bernard.

KB

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