Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Since the era of urban transport reform and focus on more sustainable mobility in America began in earnest in the early 1990s, Americans have looked abroad for inspiration. Americans have studied, then eventually implemented, bicycle transport innovations from the Netherlands and Copenhagen; bus rapid transit solutions from Curitiba, Brazil, and Bogota; Columbia, rail passenger transport; and land use integration in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Singapore; public transport planning in Canada; residential traffic management (“traffic calming”) ideas from the Netherlands, Britain, and Australia; a “Vision Zero” (no traffic deaths) approach to traffic safety from Scandinavia; and safer ways of managing traffic at street and road junctions from western Europe and Australia; among many other innovative ideas. The intellectual and technological transfer of ideas from abroad has been facilitated by US federal transport agencies, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the experience of individual American urban transport scholars and practitioners, and the proliferation of information available in print and digital form. America, which has long seen itself as “exceptional”, thus sui generis in all things including transport, has reached out globally for solutions to pressing urban transport problems. How and why this is so is a story of successful globalization.