 Mobility and transport in our cities are powerful illustrations of the world's current triple crises. The pandemic has brought the movement of people in cities to a halt, hyperlocalising and virtualising our activities. The climate emergency is forcing us to recognise that the way we travel across and between our cities has make and break implications for global efforts re-establishing a safe climate. And seeing who has access to the city and who is excluded and what consumes our streets and what contributes to urban life makes abstract notions of justice and fairness comprehensible. For urban transport, the early 2020s are going to be an inflection point hard to overestimate. As a result, uncertainties not only exist in relation to future mo-chairs but average travel distances in cities including and beyond travel to work. Are we witnessing the shift towards 15-minute walkable urban districts virtualising digital connectivity for metropolitan and global accessibility or the persistence of a physically connected one-hour metropolitan region? Welcome to the third urban age debate focusing on localising transport towards the 15-minute city or one-hour metropolis. The Urban Age Debate series is organised by LSE cities, the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and the LSE School of Public Policy. Today's debate is also kindly supported by SAP and Terralytics. My name is Philip Rode, I'm the Executive Director of LSE Cities and I will co-chair the next 60 minutes with my colleague Isabel Dedrin who is Global Transport Leader at Arup here in London. On behalf of both of us, a very warm welcome to our three panellists, Ed Glazer, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Sir Peter Handy, the Chair of Network Rail in the UK, and Julissa Kani, Chief Business Development Officer of TransNet who owns and operates South Africa's rail network. LSE Cities will be live tweeting during the event if you want to join the discussion on Twitter, the hashtag is Urban Age Debates. This online event is also being live streamed on our Urban Age YouTube channel which will be made available as a podcast and YouTube video afterwards. We are also running a survey on urban transport futures at the moment and in case you'd like to contribute, my colleagues will share the link with you later on. Now, in terms of the structure of today's debate, we are going to take this in three intense rounds. First, a speculation on the new temporal geography of cities. Second, discussing the question of public transport futures and finance. And third, reclaim the street, the tension between place functions and mobility functions of our urban street environments. Throughout, please make use of the Q&A. We hope to take one or two questions after each round, but adding your views, questions, comments will also help to broaden the perspective throughout as they can be seen by everyone. Let me now begin with our first round, formerly the new temporal geography of cities and the tension between hyperlocalization and on the other hand, the metropolitan region. The pandemic has of course forced all of us to appreciate the local scale in our cities, but also allowed us to test how feasible and desirable hyperlocalization is. At the same time, over the last two years, we have seen mayors, urban policymakers and planners that have become quite interested in accessibility in the local level, and the issue of the 15 minute city, which is kind of developing quite rapidly as a potentially new paradigm for urban development. The survey on transport futures also suggests that a global group of urban practitioners and thinkers think that there is a considerable likelihood that in the future, we will see greater levels of proximity and greater degrees of localization within our cities. Yet at the same time, what does this actually mean then for access across the metropolitan region? Does this matter less therefore? What are the transport implications of combining digital and physical access? And finally, what are other trip purposes than commuting that we really have to consider as we move forward. So we have a quick round of two minutes speculations now by our panelists. We'll start with Peter, then you Lisa and Ed Peter may I invite you to speak first. Thank you. You'll see, if you look at my video that I'm an old man and I've been around in urban transport for a long time. And that doesn't mean that my opinions are right, but they're informed by at least experience. And I think the straight answer to the question does daily access within metropolitan region still matter. I think the real answer. My answer to that is yes. And I think although we've learned to live with this wonderful global technology of having meetings while sitting at home. And actually the psychological mental effects of it and the desire of people to get out and actually physically be in and see each other has been only exacerbated by the lack of contact that we've had. Our city London or my city London is just coming out of a stage at which for the first time we're able to go to restaurants and sit indoors with other people and people are enormously enthusiastic to do that. Another member of this panel and I have exchanged photographs of ourselves in restaurants in the last 48 hours because we could do it. And I think that's true of work as well. And while I think that this technology certainly will enable me to conduct meetings from home whenever I choose. It's not what I'm going to choose to do. And more importantly, I don't think it's what we as an employer will choose to do, or many other people in the city will choose to do. And I think for those reasons, the city centre and the activities in the central business district whilst they're going to change are not redundant. The effect on retail businesses is far more dramatic and likely in my view at least to be far longer lasting because we have learned to be able to buy and have things delivered whether they're food or other things without moving from the house. But so what does that future look like in our business, which is the National Railway Network, it might mean that people access the centre of cities three days a week, not five days a week. No days a week, I think is stunningly unlikely. But what we might be thinking about is what the transport implications are not of a system that's full of people at the peak twice a day for every day of the week, but one where actually the peak is only on maybe on Wednesdays or more plausibly Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, and certainly not a five day week. And that will cause us to think quite think very hard about pricing and about the amount of transport supply. There's just one other thing that I want to say which is that all our experience in the last 15 months has proved to us that whilst people are very compliant faced with an illness that could possibly kill you for work purposes. So the experience is for leisure, people will pack into public transport and go where they want to go to enjoy themselves. And that's been a really interesting feature and certainly as far as I'm concerned, we're going to have to think again about the use of national public transport networks for leisure, because if we can't fly to the places that we'd really like to go to on an exciting basis and many of us won't be able to do that maybe for a very long time. So if we were to go to the seaside, the mass transport is better taken. Thanks. That's great, Peter. And thank you so much for also highlighting already one big question about leisure travel right up front. Let's move to you Lisa. You know I wish I could let you on to the last speaker's opening remarks but let me rather focus on the 15 minute city or a one hour metropolis. I think that's a very noble idea and for me it's probably, it's an old target that we've been chasing as cities but rather elusive for a developing South African city because of our context and this is a context that might be known by most people on the conference but reality is South Africa in particular is still plagued by an appetite spatial form characterised by long commutes, multiple connections, you hardly jump from one mode. I mean you hardly take one mode from origin to your destination, people still need to make connections, even though we've introduced the bus rapid transit systems with the idea of reducing the connections, it still boils down to one having to connect. We also have a public transport system that is unintegrated, we're not lacking in terms of supply of public transport, in fact we probably have an oversupply, but it's unintegrated. You know you don't have a seamless and integrated ticketing system either. And of course with an ever growing urban sprawl. And again, when I when I looked at the reasons why we still stuck in the old world of 25 years ago, which is pre the appetite era. It's not for the lack of policies that will enable us to change our special reform. I guess it's a case of the unintegrated fashion in which the three spheres of government operate you've got a national government you've got a provincial government you've got a local, a government in the bulk of the works it's actually at a local level, but be that as it may I mean that's something that will probably unpack later. So there in lies our problem, but I just want to delve into the latest national household travel surveys that we released a late last year or early this year I can remember an average commuting in South Africa is 76 minutes. It takes 107 minutes to commute by train. It takes 84 minutes to commute by bus 64 minutes to commute by taxi which is the most popular door to door and informal service and 49 minutes by car. So I guess for me if you were to give me a target of an hour, I'd be more than happy to pursue that as opposed to the ideal of a 15 minute commute. Of course, I mean, having experienced being operating under COVID-19 regulations a lot has changed, but to the previous speakers point you all are dying to God then start again with commuting and then doesn't matter how long it is as long as you're outside of your, your home environment you just become your office, but be that as it may I'm hoping that there will be available lessons learnt for whatever we've gone through, but also use the time to play catch up and see what, what new ways of doing things can we learn. I certainly have a view that even though people are yearning and dying to go back to the offices for a lot of people because traveling in South Africa is a little bit costly. The moving South Africa says commuters shouldn't spend more than 10% of their disposable income on public transport but their reality is, it's anything from 25% to up to 40%. So I guess this is a much needed relief from people's pockets, instead of spending that money on public transport and commuting, they're spending it elsewhere I suppose, but those are just my opening remarks Philip thank you so much. Thank you, you Lisa, very helpful to appreciate a context that's different from the European and North American where costs for travel are enormous, both in terms of time and actual money and household income shares. So back to this but Ed over to you, your speculation. Thank you Philip and it's wonderful to be here. There are aspects of the 15 minute city that are praiseworthy. I yield to no one in my embrace of the pedestrian city of walking as being the best of all of all possible modes. I yield to no one in my belief that city should be freed from the business regulations that make it difficult to start small shops and residential neighborhoods, and to bring in exciting cafes the fruits of urban entrepreneurship anywhere. But the basic concept of a 15 minute city is not really a city at all. It's a concept of an enclave of a ghetto of an isolated neighborhood. These neighborhoods should be archipelagos of neighborhoods, but those neighborhoods must be connected. Otherwise they're not places of opportunity. Otherwise a child or a young man living in let's say the township of Alex in Johannesburg cannot get to his job in the Rose Bank mall. One of the things that we've discovered about life in American cities over the past 20 years is that while they are engines of opportunity for adults, they are dead ends for children. And we see this very much in the upward mobility data that my colleague Raj Chetty has put together that people who live children who grow up in cities end up doing much worse than children who grow up outside them. One explanation for this difference is that an adult doesn't live in a 15 minute city. An adult wakes up a poor adult a low income adult wakes up in their, their, you know, small apartment and then they go to a job somewhere else. They find opportunity with people who are wealthier with people who are better educated. They find possibilities. The child lives in a 15 minute city. The child lives in their housing project. They go to their highly segregated school. They live in a world that is no more integrated than a poor rural village. That's what I see. That's what I hear when I think about a 15 minute city. I think about a world in which the rich have isolated themselves from the poor, and the poor are cut off. The view that we can then duplicate real movement with virtual movement is a fantasy for less well educated members of this world. If you look at the share of Americans who were working virtually working via zoom in May of 2020 70% of Americans were like us right now doing our work over zoom we're teleworking 5% of Americans without a high school degree. We're working via zoom. This new virtual world if we allow it to persist is one that is even more unequal than the past 30 years of inequality. And so ultimately, I think the right thing is to is that well we should praise the good elements of the 15 minute city, the idea of accessibility the idea of using less driving when we can perhaps embracing congestion pricing in the US which I've long advocated, not only on street parking requirements, but ultimately, we should bury the idea of a city that is chopped up into 15 minute bits. We must embrace connection post COVID, we must embrace a reemergence of the whole city of humanity that is connected to the people next to you but with all of our metropole of all of the world, because ultimately, that's what we've learned I think from this COVID period that in fact, all of us are in this together. And if we're going to make sure that this never happens again, we're going to work together, and we need to also particularly work in a way that enables those people who start with less to connect to the rest of the city. Ed thank you so much a lot of passion and a very clear direction of thinking about this and, most importantly, not the obvious point about jobs but highlighting that children, those in need for education, actually risk being locked in if we really think about the 15 minutes to literally, and Isabel can I just get you in here with observations across our statements and maybe also what's emerging in our Q&A. Okay. Yeah, I think there's a point there in the Q&A which is around you know inclusion accessibility I've been just in the other panelists views on its point there around 15 minute city as a kind of restrictive concept rather than an enabling concept I don't know you Lisa or Peter if you'd you on that. Well, I agree. I think the prospects of creating further inequality by trying to create enclaves of different sorts of people I mean that just I can't imagine from the British perspective how you might possibly create a planning system that put into 15 minute areas of the city that the diverse nature of the population in a way that would create equality. And I think I think that it's absolutely right which is that the danger is that what you create is a is a very large series of walled enclaves to the rich and huge deprivation for the poor. And actually, but the whole thing seems to me to be unfeasible simply because cities grow up alongside their transport networks and certainly fixed transport networks create a longevity of the design of the city which is possibly unlikely to change in the very, you know, simply because city planners or city mayors have a, oh, we'll have a 15 minute city idea. I just don't see that but I agree with that I don't like, I don't want to see it either. Let's hear from you Lisa this is a context think of Johannesburg but even Cape Town which is quite movement intense. It requires large parts of the population to access jobs over great distances we heard about the time and also the money being spent on that movement intensity. Lisa, are you equally passionate about seeing the enormous risk of sort of being a bit more maybe ration not rationing but being a bit more sort of optimizing in terms of the distribution of urban function so we don't have to travel that much. Or would you also warn heavily against any form of reducing the mobility and the enormous amount of movement that is made possible through our transport systems in cities. Thanks, let me answer this in this fashion, accessing a city in South Africa is not a matter of choice. It's a matter of survival. And unfortunately I mean cities typically in South Africa and I am agglomeration of economic activities if you want to survive you have to be in the city center. What that has done, however, is that it has put the cities under pressure and government is forever responding to the infrastructure demands as a result of rapid urbanization. It does. It's a good thing. You're right people must be able to access jobs they must be able to access education they must be able to access health facilities. What that does, however, it strips the the the rural areas off the basic infrastructure, right. So it doesn't matter how much you want to be in a rural space because you like the peacefulness and whatever it comes with it. There's no way you're going to survive in that kind of environment. That's point number one point number two which I found extremely interesting and I thought it was a lost opportunity. We went into lockdown level five way when essentially we're locked into our homes and nothing was was was was working. The township economies were not allowed to to to thrive. They were literally locked down, just like the rest of the country. However, if you're an urban in an urban environment you could go online and buy your groceries. The person in the township still had to travel some distance to get their basic amenities or whatever needs the daily needs that they have as opposed to allowing the townships to self sustain and self contain. That's the one thing we've missed as as South Africa allowing township economy to thrive the focus is always in the citizen I understand but to what end are people going to be running away from these rural areas just just for basic survival. So for me it's a precarious balance and and the reality is that people want to look for better opportunities, but it should be by choice, not as a matter of survival. We have what we call a global city region where, you know, the planning of our special reform in how to in particular extends further outside of how to itself it goes towards the Northwest, which is our mining tunnel and goes towards the south which is where you find a lot of guests production and all of that. I guess the aim of that is actually to tap into the labor market but because of the distances it's quite difficult to connect at the three but it's another noble idea but just to close up. I think for me it's a precarious balance we shouldn't we shouldn't invest in one at the expense of the other that's all I'm trying to say and people must have the choices and not be stuck because you've got no options or alternatives. Thank you Elisa and that also resonates what's coming up through the the Q&A highlighting, you know that in some ways we are setting this up as an artificial polemic. It's either the one hour metro region versus the 15 minute city and there's a lot of mutual connection and they can of course work together. If we accept that the movement will be important at the metropolitan scale. We need to think about public transport very hard over to Isabel for the second round. Okay, so we're already behind schedule so we're going to try and like the even you know more brief in our statements. So the second sort of topic we wanted to cover was around public transport futures and finance and especially the whole business model of public transport. We're arguably already creaking before coven arrived because of the pressures on ridership, the pressures that are created by new mobility providers, taking ridership away from public transport in some cases. So is there an opportunity and you talked about congestion pricing earlier. Does coven create an opportunity for us to accelerate the rethinking of how we pay for public transport. And how we finance that whether that's new tax methods whether that's changing the subsidy approach whether that's roping in the new mobility providers to help pay for the assets that they're using every day. And first on this one, couple of minutes from you Lisa. Thank you so much is about let me, let me start by saying that if you look at our fiscal, the allocation towards public transport in South Africa is probably about 5%. And this is not to say that public transport is not important but there are other pressing needs. There's human settlement there's water and sanitation there's electricity. And I guess a public transport becomes we so used to the fact that we pay more than than we should point number one. If you look at that allocation, it goes towards the newly built bus rapid transit systems, that's fine, but you need to make an assessment of whether BRT is working in South Africa. And my point is, it's working to some extent, but you need to get to a point where you are saying it actually should not have been rolled out in 10 or nine cities in South Africa it's just not working. We were supposed to be running BRT is by 2010 which was the launch of the FIFA World Cup. Every three cities are currently running BRT is 10 years after the World Cup came and went so that money could be channeled somewhere towards public transport as opposed to infrastructure development on the BRT I'm not saying do a shady job and don't give people the, you know, infrastructure for for commuting, but not to extend to that it costs to implement the BRT system in South Africa. I want to highlight two things. You speak about a a a a a a a a a a road. What congestion charging or road pricing congestion charging. That's the was sorry I my English and I will wait there for a second congestion charging congested. User shall pay principle is okay. But in a country where people don't have an alternative. The cutting freeway improvement scheme failed dismally. People are refusing to pay for for for the system so it's it's become a huge debt for government to take care of for obvious reasons people are saying, I don't have an alternative if I could use a public transport I would but I'm being forced to go on the free and commute long distances and you want to charge me for your own failure. I guess there's a context to what works in a different city I would certainly say that if you look at again one last example the fuel levy. The bulk of the fuel levy is ring fence for the road accident fund which is the fund that is used for compensating road accident victims. And ask yourself, should we not be focusing on preventing road accident, which means that we look at alternative forms of people commuting as opposed to spending so much money on compensating people for something that we should be having under control in the first So I guess with the limited budget that we have there could be a better allocation of it towards the public transport system, as opposed to the road system and other things that are not giving from which we're not deriving the best value in terms of servicing our commuters and our citizens. Yeah, so it's looking at it in the round rather than sort of often we look at the funding from a piecemeal perspective mode by mode. And over to you. Thank you. I want to make three major points. The first of which is, it feels as if for the first time perhaps in a half century that in fact transportation is again changing that we are having actually important changes in transportation technology, the rise of autonomous vehicles, and there are various other things which may actually have have a major difference whereas I think for many of us I mean I'm 54 years old. The transportation that I take now is not very different than the transportation I take when I was born 50 years ago, which was incredibly different than the difference between 1967 and 1917 or 1913 right so we've had a very slow period. I think because of that rabbit change, it makes sense to keep flexibility to allow the future to catch up with us, and to enable our cities to embrace the new technologies as they come along. But again, following up your lease is very wise comment that don't do it in nine cities at once experiment evaluate use the wisdom that comes with experience. The second point I want to make is on the the means of paying for it. I believe very strongly that most of the time something like user pays is right. Particularly for anything involving middle income or wealthy people. Right, I think the idea that you're going to subsidize people to fly in and out of John F. Kennedy Airport with general tax dollars is an absolutely terrible idea. Sometimes, because the marginal cost of a service is so much lower than the average cost is in the case of some rail, it makes sense to figure out creative ways to do user cost pain pain. My favorite example of course is Hong Kong's MTR model, where they build large scale real estate developments on top of train stations and effectively the real estate development subsidizes the rail which is a beautiful way of keeping the rail price low, while still having functionally the still pay for pay for things. The, there are cases in which that's very difficult, I think, for example, the idea that you're obviously going to want to subsidize buses for poor people that feels absolutely completely right to me in the context of South Africa, I think one of the great challenges is that you often have two technologies coexisting with one technology for the rich, the other technology for the poor. So for example in Johannesburg you have the goutrain a sleek fast modern rail service coexisting with jitneys with mini buses that are crowded often unsafe and wait till they're packed to take them. And the question is, should you be trying to make the rich technology available for everyone, or I think probably more sustainably, should you be trying to upgrade the current poor technology, should you be integrating the mini buses in a system which makes it so fragile together that they work more seamlessly with other modes that they're safer, which is something of the model that Istanbul followed I think about 30 years ago when it went falling I think in many cases you want to think more about the upgrading the poor system, the system for the poor rather than just trying to move everyone to something that happens to work well in in Paris. Third point on congestion pricing. So again I'm following Ulysses point on this, but there is no substitute for actually doing something that that functionally taxes carbon. You need to subsidize alternative uses of transportation hope that will work out. You need to do something that actually limits people's incentive to actually fly or drive, and that really requires something like congestion pricing it certainly doesn't require anything that involves subsidizing driving, right it certainly doesn't require you know using general tax revenues to pay for highways, or having free parking requirements of all things. But at the same time, and that's in some sense the genius of what Ken Livingston did, gosh it must be 20 years ago in London of combining congestion pricing with an embrace of public transportation and sort of making sure that the congestion pricing revenues went to enable people to ride on the bus, because in fact if it's done right congestion pricing means that the rich people pay right to make the commutes faster and more comfortable for the poor. And that's ultimately what the sort of bargain that we're trying to get to here is one in which you aren't particularly penalizing poor people but you're enabling them to take public transportation which has been made both faster and more comfortable because of congestion pricing. Thanks very much Ed and I think that point you're making around kind of trying things and flexibility which is something as an industry we're not very good at in transport as we kind of pick something and then we're going to really throw ourselves into it, rather than sort of trying things, developing evolving more organically and maybe there's some lessons there and how we fund things as well. Peter over to you. So, so I've got five points really. I think the first one is to say the obvious point which is transport isn't an end in itself it's a means to an end. But both the money spent on building the infrastructure and the money spent on operating it is not because people just want to travel per say it's because the result of that mobility creates creates economic value and wealth. And in particular, certainly in Britain we've seen that very recently, because the government has spent an enormous amount of public money, keeping bus and train services running with very few people using them. They haven't done that because he natively running running buses and railways is a good thing. They've recognized that the movement of the relatively small proportion of the population who needed to move during the pandemic was so valuable to the economy in society that it was worth putting the money into to allow allow them to travel. And the example of Hong Kong is a is a is a brilliant one because actually, as I just said transport doesn't exist on its own. And in fact the consequence certainly of transport infrastructure but also transport services. And I just wrote is that is the property values are affected. And of course the significant thing about the Hong Kong empty are just as Japanese railways east and other transport companies that allegedly make money is that they're not transport companies at all their property companies with a transport arm. The empty are is a developer that runs a metro. And, and, and it's, and it's a very sensible thing to do. Sadly, British law explicitly prevents it for some reason that's entirely unaccountable. And in London prior to 1933, the Metropolitan Railway started the state company. It didn't make much money running trains but it made a lot of money turning farmland into Edwardian housing and in out of London. But my, my predecessors, when I was at TFO in London transport were explicitly prohibited from doing that so the value of turning that land into something more valuable, accrued to the developers with relatively low taxation rather than the transport company. If you fix that there's a lot you can fix beyond it. The fourth point is about fares and all too often and is about and I have both been in this space, city mayors and politicians think cheap fares are a good thing. It's a remarkably blunt way of giving poor people access to transport, especially in an era when you wouldn't know whether my car attacked on a, on a car reader about what fare I paid compared to somebody who had a third of my income. I think one of the challenges that we have to address sooner or later in transport is that if we want fares income for whatever political or economic reason to form a significant part of the operating costs of public transport, then we better do something about the fact that the level of paying fares is extremely unequal. And it seems completely extraordinary to me, you know, the cheap fare policy of the current mayor of London, for whom I no longer work at least not in transport terms, has afforded people who travel long distances on London's public transport, a much greater discount than the poor people that he intended should should get relatively cheap bus fares. The public transport is absolutely self-evident, and it's already been mentioned by everybody, which is that charging for road space is quite an obvious thing to do. And in fact, in the post COVID environment, certainly in Britain, it's an even more obvious thing to do because the public transport usage is well in London this morning, as my old friends at TFL sent in the information, bus uses at 60% of pre-pandemic levels, the railways about 35 or 40%, road traffic volumes are at 93%. So unless we go back to something that looks very significantly like normal, we might wind up in a situation with less public transport usage, less fares income, the economics of public transport being worse, but greater congestion. You can't see any greater solution staring you in the face, at least if you're anything but another politician, than charging people for road space. And this debate really isn't going to go away. Whatever the city looks like. Thank you. Thanks, Peter. And I think that actually kind of leads into the next part of our discussion. And maybe we can bring in because quite a few of the comments in the Q&A are sort of relating back to the planning aspects in the 15 minute city. And maybe the sort of third bit, which is around reclaiming the street as as Philips dubbed it, you know, the whole place versus movement function. And as you know, many of us on this call know, it's extremely, you know, politically fraught to talk about even one square meter of road space. There's a perception that it's a zero sum game, you know, if he gets it, I don't get it. Is there a way to break through that? Isn't that just going to get worse under the circumstances you've just set out there, which is more and more pressure on, you know, imbalance in which the roads are getting the movement on them too much on the roads, arguably in private vehicles, not enough on public transport, the pressures created by new mobility providers, but also the opportunities created by new mobility providers. The sort of, you know, belief that, you know, if only we provided safe cycling for everyone, then everyone would cycle and no one would ever get on any form of transport ever again, which is, you know, common in some quarters. So how do we think about the reclaiming the street agenda, this sort of place movement thing, you know, calmly, in a context where there's so much pressure on the fundamental business model of movement in cities in particular, and in public transport more generally feels like maybe people want to pull back from that rather than kind of step into it. How do we find that balance, Ed? I have a question that the COVID crisis has made the pressure on the streets much worse. I'm told that, you know, traffic congestion in Brooklyn has never been as bad because people aren't taking public transportation the same way that they used to because of fear. I think that raises a larger issue, which is the COVID pandemic has been in some sense an attack on our urban life. Right. It has reminded us that while there are many assets that come with cities. Right. It has given us the ability to share to connect to learn from one another they've been enabling chains of creativity since Plato and Socrates bickered on an Athenian street corner. But they also come with considerable downsides with the demons of density and the most terrible of these is contagious disease. Right, which from the plague of Athens in 430 BC to the plague of Justinian and 541 CE down to the cholera epidemics of the mid 19th century they have been troubling our cities we've had a blessed outbreak of plague free existence since the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, but we have been reminded it is it has not been nearly as bad as it could have been. Let us make sure that our governments heed this warning and don't let this happen again. This requires a much more serious approach to pandemic and that is actually the most important thing. Before the streets can properly be reclaimed. We need to actually be making the kind of investments in public health. I've argued elsewhere for essentially a NATO for for public health and NATO against pandemic. Not rather than the WHO and that's really the first and most important step to reclaim the streets. I think, you know, there's no surefire recipe against cars, but a healthy embrace of congestion pricing is clearly a good place to start on this. And a recognition that we can allocate more space to pedestrian travel travel that's that's also great. But at the same time, we must heed to Peter's warning that we need mobility. Right. We cannot think that there is any future in 15 minute enclaves. Right. This is a this is a urban dead end if ever there was one. And we need to make sure that people can access the wonders of the city can access the cornucopia of joys and people that exist throughout the particular urban area, and we particularly need need to make sure that we enable people who grow up who live in poorer parts of the city to access jobs in richer parts of the city. And there's nothing more important than that and the view that you know somehow or other we're improving accessibility as one of the comments in the chat did by enabling people to zoom in. Making down sort of barriers could not be more completely wrong. If we make the way to access jobs be through the internet. We are locking out an entire third of the American population that is unable to do that there's unable to manage the technology to make that happen. And I cannot imagine a world that is more unegalitarian than a world that has eliminated real face to face urban connections and tried to replace them with virtual links. Thanks very much. Peter. So I'll be quick. We've already discussed right pricing. It is the obvious way of rationing right space and although as well you and I were there 20 years ago when Ken Livingston introduced it in 2000. 2003. Politicians are still afraid of it but it is the obvious thing to do. And I think I think the pandemic as it says it's right there will be renewed emphasis. It comes to pass the congestions even worse than it was before. The second point is that this isn't just a transport issue. Again, it's a city planning and and and built environment issue. And one of the answers to it paradoxically is density. The city is dense enough. You don't think of using private transport. And although I'm not sure as I'm critical of the 15 minute city concept. In fact, if the city is dense enough. There are many places that you can walk to because there's so much going on. And once that doesn't give you a complete 15 minute city. I mean one of the obvious things to do is to move away from low density development in on the outskirts of cities of several million and go back to density and oddly, the retail revolution which I mentioned to start with which has barely been mentioned but retail as a as a as a whole activity. It has been devastated and will not recover so there's a real opportunity in the centre of many cities to repurpose valuable land for high density living. And I think successful cities will will will do that. And then the last thing I'd just like to say is that inevitably it is political and some of the voices are very shrill and very loud. I know that I don't have to deal with them anymore. I'm not, I'm not very keen on the cycling community. I think I think it's disproportionately male. It's disproportionately middle and upper class and it's disproportionately noisy. One of the consequences in the city in which I live, not the one I run transport in anymore when I live, which is London is that my bus journeys are slower and less reliable, because many fewer people have got faster and safer safer safer safer cycle journeys. And that really has to be a matter of politics. It's an observation of mine, but actually bus users are not as vocal as as as middle class male cyclists will see how that changes. But it's a it's a fact just now thanks as well. Thank you very much Peter Philip did you want to come in with some observations there. So yeah before we come to your Lisa on the same point. It's really interesting what we're seeing in the Q&A coming up. We're going back to, I think an earlier point, Ed, you made about children and equity and having access, but then the trade off of also having seen of course, a reduction in quality of life and opportunities to bond connect socialize because of the deterioration of the public spaces, the sort of overemphasize says of the movement function. And then also Johannes Fiedler who is saying, you know, be again a bit more precise what for what kind of trip purposes are we talking about 15 minutes for what others, ie, you know, education and maybe the job is of course the metropolitan scale important, but just having listened to both of you, Ed and Peter, we're coming out of an era where clearly we have over emphasized mobility and movement as a mechanism of accessing opportunity. And we have, in many instances, sacrificed very good urbanism in the spirit of prioritizing movement and the way and this is the discussion about the street space. It's just plain obvious what has happened here and we are regretting it and most mayors on our seeing opportunities of reintroducing other more localized uses of our streets rather than just having sort of the movement function being celebrated. Yesterday the OECD published an estimate what is going to happen over the next 30 years in terms of transport intensity and, you know, business as usual of course we will double the amount of kilometers we travel per year. A lot of this may happen in our metropolitan regions, but is this really the trajectory we feel comfortable with, because we are so confident that it leads to those social benefits which Ed alluded to, and that we cannot. We cannot use alternatives forms of access. I think it's such an important question when we then start designing the street spaces of the future. Back to you Isabel and then we'll bring in of course the Ulysses with the South African. Yeah, let's just get Ulysses perspective and then we can look at the chat again. Ulysses. I mean, COVID-19 has highlighted what we already knew in South Africa which is one inequality and added to that was obviously the digital divide that that we saw was some people could work from home some people didn't have internet connection and kids could learn from home hundreds of thousands of kids in South Africa dropped out of school as a result. But I also think that it gave us an opportunity to kind of just pause a little bit and reevaluate the plans, but I want to go to some very important steps that I want to share with you. 17.4 million South Africa's walk all the way to their destination. 10.7 million use taxis and this is the only mode of transport that is not subsidized. 6.2 million use cars and metro was at 1.65 pre COVID and it halted to a grand standstill during COVID. So for me it's a no brainer to say hang on a sec where where where should we be investing in terms of of mobility. As much as I mean probably in a in a European context there's enough cycling pathways that you probably you know out of the view that you know people can still get by in South Africa there's there's little to not. It's a little opportunity window for opportunity we had for people to be able to cycle was when we're introducing the BRT systems so at the same time we kind of invested in public transport. So I'm not going to go into the definition walkways but only in as far as the BRT route nothing nothing beyond where that route are terminated. Another missed opportunity but I again for me, the statistics are actually taking to us where our next investment should be. That's just my view it's probably going to be the cheapest way of allowing people to be mobile in South Africa, but I agree with the view that there are South Africans who cycle for leisure but for some it's truly means to an end. Another missed opportunity I'd like to highlight in in South Africa is densification and transit oriented development, we've failed dismally. Not that there wasn't an opportunity presented to us by the cloud train as well as the BRT system but I found that it was easier for government needs policies to allow developers to build around the cloud train stations which were mainly in the suburbs, but not so much in the BRT system which runs in the townships. It's the same concept. One is a bus a rapid bus system and the other one is a is a metro rail system so I guess I'm saying there's a lot of opportunities that government has missed and missed an opportunity to generate proper revenue there that could be ring fence for for for public transport. Another sore point for us I guess is the subsidization of the minibus Texas BRT primarily was meant to do that but again we don't have enough money to roll out BRT is throughout the country we don't even need that but the question is, if it takes the lion's share of public transport. How then do we subsidize the public transport commuters that are using that mode of transport it's a there's so many studies that have shown that it's an absolute necessity, and maybe we're just struggling with the how but it's again another missed opportunity from from from our end. Just be quick later so there's a lot of interest in the 15 minute city in the in the chat and sort of you know is it a good thing at the one level is it a good thing or bad thing and I think the way Camilla's put it there you know, it's about saying people want to be able, you know, can we enable people to do the things they want to do within 15 minutes from their house as opposed to you can't leave your 15 minute zone. Coming back to coven briefly, you know, a lot of people have said there's been a you know radical reduction in commuting and a big increase in people moving locally is that an opportunity, you know that's a threat in some ways for the public transport network because it's been built up around the idea of pumping the heart of the city. And if that is sustained and then there needs to be a fundamental rethink of the public transport network design and also business model, you know, is this a permanent shift is it not there's been a lot of discussion about that. But you know, given how illustrious this panel is I'd be interested in people's views on you know, is coven an inflection point in terms of how people move in cities, whether that's from a 15 minute city perspective or any other perspective, or do you see this as being a moment that was a moment in time and broadly we're going to go back to the way we were before I don't know whether one of you would want to comment on that, Peter. Yeah, I'm just thinking the one big permanent change that seems to me to have been have happened and be irreversible is the retail change. Certainly Britain, our city and town centres, the retail environment will never return the retailers themselves have gone out of business. And that does seem to me to be a permanent change. Employment, I think employers are still trying to decide what to do. Leisure, there will never be a big art gallery within 15 minutes of my house. I'm going to have to go to the center of the city for that and I'm looking forward to it, and I'm looking forward to going to a restaurant afterwards and having a walk around the city but retail retail is you know if if Philip if you want to look at the next big thing, trying to work out what replaces retail as both the focus of people's attention in town centres and as a land use. I think he's a really really valuable thing because it isn't going back the way it was. So Peter's just right on that. I mean, even and it's a trend that long predated COVID right stores that sell experiences were replacing stores that sell goods. Of course, COVID has derailed that, but you know 32 million Americans one fifth of the employed labour force pre COVID worked in what you can call broadly the urban service sector that's retail trade, leisure and hospitality. Right. If those, in some sense the sort of permanent inflection occurs if if this pandemic happens again, if there are new variants that break through the vaccines if we get another another pandemic, then that whole sector which employs vast numbers of less well educated as Americans that whole sector is is at risk and that that really is the the big danger moving forward. I want to take issue with something Philip said about over emphasizing mobility, which is he's entirely right that we have over emphasize the mobility of the rich. Right, we have not over emphasize the mobility of the poor at all. In fact we have largely neglected the mobility of the poor, especially in the United States. I'm very worried that a focus on enabling upper middle income people to walk around in their nice little 15 minute neighborhood, precludes the far larger issue which is how that how do we make sure our cities once again become places of opportunity for everyone. Right, enormous inequalities in cities are only tolerable if cities fulfill their historic mission of turning poor people into rich people. I am only interested in urban planning concepts that fundamentally solve that and I cannot see how the 15 minute city does anything on that. Very much Ed, we now need to do the final round and it's literally a sentence or two from each of you and Isabel also from your end. And I'd be really interested building on what Ed just said whether on overall whether this issue of travel and transport intensity let's measure it in the kilometers we travel on average per person per year, whether this is something a measure, which for the benefit of society should remain equal should go up should be reduced and then of course the any any views on on the equity issue which Ed just mentioned as well whether there's any really important message for anyone working on the 15 minute city where there is a major mistake, which can go wrong, not incorporating the equity domain. Let's start with Peter then you Lisa and Isabel. So, so very quickly, I'm unconvinced about the 15 minute city, and I'm unconvinced that I've seen many urban environments where it can be adapted in the near future. I think the volume of travel for work will decrease but not by very much. And the volume of travel for leisure will increase. And I think the next question as I was just saying for the next question for me is, what do you do with the decline of retail that's the most pressing question in in today's towns and cities at least in Britain. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you Lisa. Philip, I mean, for me, it depends on where you're sitting on on the food chain, right. If you are middle class or high income earner, you, it's possible, you can do your e-commerce sitting at the comfort of your house. You can do learning online, etc. But it's not really possible for the poor community so mobility and access to the city is still going to be a big thing. As I said in my introduction, it's a noble idea, but I'm not sure if we're there yet in my case, I think an hour would be great and 45 minutes would be would be excellent. Again, I mean we have an opportunity to reevaluate where we're going to derive the most benefit, depending on where we invest in terms of mobility but mobility is extremely essential in my space otherwise people can't thrive. Thank you and Ed. The 15 minute city has two great concepts in it. They should be embraced. The idea of a 15 minute city should be killed. The two great concepts are pedestrian walkable space, right, which is, which is absolutely what we need and we should absolutely reclaim street space from cars and give them to ordinary people allow us to walk on it. Secondly, embrace entrepreneurship, ground level entrepreneurship, both to reboot our economy post COVID and to enable the stores that sell experiences to replace the stores that sell goods. In appalling thing in the US that we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor so much more strictly than we regulate the entrepreneurship of the rich, because the rich innovate in cyberspace which is largely a free zone, the poor actually, you know, innovate in the ground in real things. We must rethink those regulations we must unleash the urban creativity that exists in every poor neighborhood as well as every rich neighborhood, and we must make sure that our cities work together as a whole, rather than be separated and divided into enclaves. Thank you very much, Ed and Isabelle. Thanks very much, Philip. You asked a question about, you know, are we going to see more or less volume of movement, you know, thousands of years of human history tell us that people don't start moving less, you know, there's a fundamental desire, whether we change our movement from work movement to leisure movement. There's a question and what mode we're on, but the idea that people are going to move less because they're going to do things virtually that has not been proven through, you know, many thousands of years of history so we shouldn't be planning for you know things continuing as they are in terms of mobility being a key part of being human. But I think that we need to use and we don't have a choice but to use this moment in time as a moment of very significant radical change in the transport industry. There are pressures around equity, whether you call it leveling up, you know, the rise of populist political movements, etc. Combined with the climate and sustainable development push which is now kind of really filtered into the mindset and to the corporate world means that the old models, the business models, and the ways of working are not going to be acceptable anymore and they already aren't, but this is an industry that moves very very slowly. So how do we find a way to move much faster in a much more agile way, but use this point in time as a moment for radical change. And I think that's really exciting for us as an industry and we need a lot of young dynamic people from non traditional backgrounds come into the industry to do that so hopefully a lot of those people are on the chat. That's great. Thank you so much, Isabel. So what's left is to thank our audience for joining us today to thank our panelists for an energetic sort of debate and sharing opinions I think it's very clear where we all were sort of on the spectrum of the different nuances of the 15 minute city and one hour metropolis. I also want to thank Emily Cruz Noah Powers and Jennifer Ho who made sure that this all worked and came together technically and logistically. And if you're interested, we have future events on the urban age debate series. The next one will focus on issues of culture will then actually move to the issue of shopping and retail as well. So do join us again. And finally, do contribute to our survey. We are running this at the moment for a few more weeks, the future of urban transport, speculations, opinions but also views and maybe advice what you would do if you had to advise government on where to put the money what kind of regulation to roll out and what ultimately to hope for. Thank you very much. And for now, this brings our debate to a conclusion.