In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.In early 2002, the Mexico City government invited EMBARQ to work with them to identify, test, and deliver environmentally and financially sustainable solutions to the city's transport-related problems. The result: a new Metrobus system was launched with 80 low-pollution buses carrying 315,000 passengers per day. They replace 350 high-polluting and dangerous buses run chaotically by 262 independent operators. Dr. Nancy Kete, Co-director of EMBARQ spoke to the Foundations Marc Lopatin. MARC: My first question is why is there a need for EMBARQ – and why do you hear so little about the issue it deals with: sustainable mobility in developing cities? NANCY: People can observe the transportation problems, they can observe the congestion, they can observe how long it takes them to move around, to get to work.  But most people cant necessarily observe the air pollution component and they just accept, without questioning it, that cities need to accommodate cars. What happened over the 20th century is more and more public space went to the private car, even in cities where only 10 or 20% of the public have cars. If you stopped and thought about it, you would question why you would do that when in reality most people are going to move by walking, by biking and in public transport.  But for some reason, classically the notion is you just have to make all the room for the cars and live with the rest of it. MARC: So, where does the Shell Foundation fit in? NANCY: The last big programmatic area the Foundation decided on was transportation. You can imagine it was a little bit of a challenge within Shell to reach the conclusion that they did want the Foundation getting into the sector that 90% or more of Shells revenue comes from.  It held several big workshops in a few places around the world to get a lot of input, and the outcome of that was that if the Foundation was to work on transportation, it should do it in a major way. Then [Foundation Director] Kurt Hoffman opened a competition and ran around the world asking different institutions if they would potentially like to host a new centre for sustainable transport.  So we, Imperial College, UCL Berkeley and others competed for it – and we won. MARC: Then you were charged with the responsibility of putting together a team, incubated by WRI, to come up with a plan and get going?  NANCY: Thats right.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.MARC: So how do you make a city work – transportation-wise? NANCY: The main thing you want to do in the city… you need to almost think of it in the following order:  You want the city to be as walkable as possible because the healthiest, cheapest way to move in a city is by walking. Then to be able to cover distances that are too far for walking, thats when you want to get into high capacity transit.  In some areas, biking fits in but Im not going to stress that.  When youre looking at your transit options what you want to have is full buses, full trains or full heavy rail or light rail so you need to have a network thats designed such that its attractive to enough users so that you have a very high capacity factor.  Then you get into the question of what kind of vehicles… why should it be buses versus light rail versus heavy rail? Here, you are looking at orders of magnitude and cost.  So, for example, bus corridors - a simple corridor thats confined so its got its own bus lane  - can cost as little as $1 or $2 million a kilometre but a light rail corridor could easily be $20 million a kilometre.  So the reason bus rapid transit is winning out as the transit option for choice is because the infrastructure is so cheap compared to any of its alternatives.  MARC: Why did you select Mexico City as the first place to establish EMBARQ? NANCY: Looking at Mexico City, it is full of roads, really wide beautiful avenues that are congested. They have all these roads created in an earlier initiative, but there was no management of traffic so the roads were always congested. And even beyond the thoroughfares being congested, if you look around the city they let cars park on sidewalks and they let cars park in the little green strips between the sidewalk and the road.  This was the same in Paris in the mid-nineties when I lived there. Then, a new Mayor of Paris changed all that.  Theyve taken all that space back for pedestrians. In Mexico City they havent started doing that quite yet but were hoping they will as part of a comprehensive traffic management plan.  MARC: Paris is a first world, very modern city but others like Mexico City and the dozens of other – mega cities, I suppose they are called, dont have that kind of resource and probably municipally cant get things done as quickly. Whats their fate then? NANCY: If you argue that they dont have much money thats creating even more of an imperative to stop, think and decide.  The other part of what you said talked about the disorganisation.  I would call it inertia.  Cities have a lot of things to do. In developing cities there tends not to be as much of a strong civil service class so when theres a new election almost everybody thats capable of doing anything goes out and a whole new crowd comes in. Often, when the incumbents go out they take the computers, they take the files, they take everything.  So often in developing cities you start fresh every four or five years.  So it takes them a year to figure out what theyre doing and then theyve got maybe three years to accomplish something and then their campaigning in the last year.  So the window to accomplish anything in a developing city is very short.  And then there are a lot of competing alternatives, and this is where EMBARQ comes in.  What we do is we go in, we try to get in at the beginning of a mayors term when there is time for him or her to realise some results that will be good for him politically down the road, as well as being good for the city, and we put in a lot of up-front time to figure out does the Mayor really want to do something about the transportation projects and will they make it a priority.  Then we go into a pretty structured planning process, again, to make sure that if you only have 3 years to accomplish it, youve thought it through really well. MARC: From listening to you it strikes me that after nearly 4 years – and a successful result in Mexico City - your challenge is to mainstream this based on evidence, experience, work, successes and challenges. If we look at the potential for ‘scale-up, there are perhaps 300 cities that could benefit from taking this kind of approach to moving citizens around. How does EMBARQ and potentially others take this to scale? NANCY: An awful lot of what we do is political with a little ‘p.  The idea was that if we could get through this in Mexico City, then people will see that success and then come to us and indeed thats happened.  We are in conversation with 10 of the next largest cities in Mexico who are asking for our help. And, were starting on the exact same model in Brazil and we are doing a project in Istanbul. With respect to Asia - which is where everybody wants to be because thats where all the growth is and the money is - I think we need to take our time. Its very hard to work in China, for example.  And then I think we have to look separately at India, which is becoming interesting. To be honest, the potential is endless. MARC: It is very exciting. Thanks ever so much.