08 December 2004

08/12/04. World Technology Award for the Environment - 2004 Webcast now on line

Email from EcoPlan, Paris
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 6:36 PM
To: NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com; Sustran-discuss@jca.ax.apc.org
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To follow up on that last paragraph of my email of this morning concerning the World Technology Award for the Environment that was given this year to Mayor Ken Livingstone and his team for their Congestion Charging project, we can now give you the URL where you can see both the Webcast for the 2004 World Technology Award ceremony in San Francisco in October: http://www.wtn.net/webcast/2004/summit/launch.html

Now if you do go there, I would suggest that you first pop the Award link at the bottom of the home page, which sets off a very long Webcast indeed. If your time is short – and whose isn’t? – you may just want to have a quick gander at the first several minutes in which the energetic WTN president James Clark explains the philosophy behind these awards (definitely interesting and quite innovative since he has set some rather challenging goals). And then if you wish to see the short acceptance speech by Jared Blumenfeld who is Director Department of the Environment of SF and who accepted the award in the good mayor’s name, you can get there by setting the little slide that controls the presentation to about 80% of the way to its end. And there you’ll have it.

There is also an acceptance speech by Mayor Livingstone which is gracious and well informed and which you will be able to click to on the bottom right. (In actual fact, Ken misses the correct attribution to the origins of thinking and theory behind road pricing, which was not Milton Friedman in 1952. Rather it was his fellow Nobel Lauriat the wonderful, innovative and very kind William Vickerey who got his idea when living in lower Manhattan, watching traffic pile up in from of the Lincoln tunnel. I know that for a fact because Professor Vickerey, who was my theory professor many years ago, told me the story himself over coffee one morning after our class at Columbia University. I guess since we are a small family that I should also go on record by saying that no matter what a great teacher he was, as he was, he and the rest of the faculty there still were not able to turn me into an economist.

There you have it.

Eric Britton
“Almost an economist”


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