Would you buy a device for your car or truck that improves safety and reduces emissions simply by encouraging better driving habits? Greenroad is such a device, and it's backed by Richard Branson and Al Gore. It's a mash-up of existing high-tech devices, including GPS, that "observes" your driving patterns, and uses coloured lights to tell you when you've deviated from the straight and narrow.

There is such a thing as a bicycle highway, operating as a network independent of regular highways. This infrastructure has emerged in Copenhagen, where there are plans for service centres, GPS-triggered traffic lights and intelligent transport systems all focused on bikes. But of course, most cities are nowhere near such cyclist nirvana.

On a recent planning project for a fairly large new office development in an urban area, the developer wanted to establish a campus feel, with strong emphasis on walking and cycling. The offices were to be low-rise and distributed at a relatively low density - generally not a great way to reduce urban sprawl, but an interesting opportunity to downplay the private motor vehicle. It's hard to get everything right, but at least we can try to make the most of the situations that present themselves.

So I jumped at the chance to convince the urban planners on the job that instead of using the internal road network to provide structure to the site layout, as is usually the case, we could start with the pedestrian / cyclist network, and hang everything off that. Cyclists would have priority over other modes of transport, but more importantly the development would be inherently good at making non-motorised transport as easy as possible. Routes would be direct, distances would be short, and instead of forcing pedestrians and cyclists to pass through parking lots, the buildings would sit directly on the bicycle network for door-to-door travel.

Bicycle lanes, even where they are included in the initial design of roads, are really just a relegation of cyclists to second-tier priority. This would be turning the usual model on its head. Brilliant, huh? 

Apparently not. Despite a project vision that said all the right things and seemed to support what I was suggesting, the planners just said "yeah, great" and went ahead with a conventional approach. In fact it would feel even less like a campus than a normal car-dominated college, since open spaces for relaxation and casual conversation were just tiny corners dotted here and there, with no real amenity. I still don't know whether the planners didn't understand, or didn't care, or if the developer wasn't interested.

In my darker moments, I find myself imagining The Revenge of the Cyclists. Forget organizing car-free days, we'll just hop on our steeds and take over the streets en masse. Get sprayed with water cannons, arrested and rehabilitated by being forced to watch cars being assembled in a General Motors factory. The hard-core rebels, those who refuse to repent, will be sent to camps where the only activity will be watching TV reruns of CHiPs. With sadistic pleasure, wardens will play Joni Mitchell singing "Big Yellow Taxi".

I wrote this as a backgrounder for a post on Arup's COP15 blog, with research and contributions from some colleagues in South Africa and Botswana. Bits of it appear in David Singleton's post, and the full article follows below.

South African President Jacob Zuma's announcement that the country will reduce emissions by 34% by 2020 has taken local and international commentators by surprise. It is not clear how much this commitment has been debated within the ANC, but there is not much public awareness of the basis for the decision, or of its social and economic implications.

Environmental awareness appears to vary significantly among rich and poor communities in developing countries. The wealthy are more likely to consider recycling or installing solar panels. However, awareness is only one challenge. In Botswana, most people lack easy access to capital, which makes even changing to CFL bulbs difficult. A solar water heater costs several months of a teacher's salary, or several years of a manual worker's salary. At household level, therefore, many technological interventions still are not feasible without subsidy or other incentives.

There are people working to raise awareness, particularly for the purpose of two-way knowledge transfer and community empowerment. Professor Bruce Hewitson, director of the Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town, and a Coordinating Lead Author on regional climate change projections for both the IPCC's 3rd and 4th Assessment Report, is working on downscaling Global Climate Models to improve their ability to help governments plan for adaptation.

At a climate change forum in Cape Town last year, Hewitson said that there is no integration between the science and the social challenges we face in responding to climate change. Vulnerability is a function of exposure to risk, the magnitude of the risk, and capacity to respond. Africa faces heavy exposure to climate-related risk of high magnitude, and has a poor capacity to respond positively. Hewitson and his group are working with organisations like weADAPT to find ways to improve collaboration between researchers and communities in improving resilience and adaptation to change.

In developing countries, there seems to be a dearth of research on community opinions about climate change, or on choices people would make if they were compelled to take action. However there are at least two possible reasons for placing a higher priority on adaptation than on mitigation in these countries. The first is that most poor countries have little scope for decreasing emissions, since they already produce so little per capita. The issues for them are health and social and economic welfare. It would be great to install solar water heaters, design more thermally comfortable homes, and reduce reliance on biomass for cooking - but the purpose should not be for reducing emissions but rather for improving quality of life.
 

Read more: Trying to understand Zuma's motivation in Copenhagen