When I first read the question “what is your ultimate vision for this country as it relates to sustainable mobility?” I thought, “define ‘sustainable mobility’ for whom?” 

For the average middle-class American living in suburbia, this means one thing. For a rural American, it means something else entirely.  For someone who lives in the inner-city, there is yet another definition.  For an owner of a big rig truck, the definition changes once again.   

Creating sustainable mobility requires a much more complex approach than just boosting one aspect of our transportation system. Green cars won’t do much on their own.  Trains are good, but they are just part of a whole.

Getting big trucks to run on something other than diesel would be even better, so long as it’s actually a sustainable solution (plenty of people argue biofuels are not the economic panacea they were supposed to be).

What we need to do is to take a second look at the old environmental dictate that acting locally impacts everyone globally.   Communities need the resources and the incentive to develop transportation resources that make sense for them locally, in a way that makes sure all transportation tax revenues are used in an equitable manner.  

Improvement to local busing systems might work better in one place, whereas light rail might work better in another.   It’s not just about moving people, either. It’s also about rethinking our living spaces and how we have arranged our local environments. 

It’s about opening the minds of those in charge to the possibilities of an integrated transportation system that meets the needs of the people and not the needs of the car companies. 

It also requires taking into account how developing good, well-rounded transportation systems could fuel our economy.  I call this the “if you make it easy and convenient, they will come” theory. 

Although it isn’t a perfect example, Little Rock, Arkansas is taking some steps in this direction as a way to draw tourists and encourage outdoor travel. 

Through the city, the Arkansas River is lined with over 100 miles of bike paths.   A few years ago, a foundation built and opened The Big Dam Bridge, which allows bikers and pedestrians to walk across the Arkansas River over the Murray Lock and Dam. 

An old railroad bridge was recently turned into a pedestrian bridge in downtown, which links a revitalized warehouse district turned Museum district. 

When the city started developing downtown a little over a decade ago, they installed street cars that roll along downtown streets, making it easy to move from the south side of the river to Argenta, on the north side. 

All this ease of movement, designed to take advantage of what people already wanted to do in the space, has fueled a huge boom in the area’s economic development.   

We should not fall into a trap of looking at our problems with sustainable transportation as a simple matter of developing the next great “new invention” that will revolutionize the entire game. 

Instead, we need to look at a mixture of solutions that work for specific communities – this will allow us to build on our already existing infrastructure, invest in new technologies to solve local problems (which will result in larger discoveries along the way), and fuel local economies at the same time.   

There are so many ways to tackle to this problem that trying to recommend one overarching solution seems almost meaningless.  What we need is a system of funding,  that fuels local change.  

We need to fund researchers to come up with solutions to specific transportation problems in specific places – and we need to fund only those researchers who intend to solve those problems in an environmentally friendly, carbon-neutral way.  

Once best practices are established and modified and adopted over time, we will have changed the DNA of our mobility systems, so to speak.