Implementation of sustainable urban transport in Latin America

Transportation provides vital support to the economic and social development of Latin America cities, but current growth patterns and trends are not sustainable. While non-motorized and public transport modes have the largest shares in passenger transport, there is a strong increase in ownership and use of cars and motorcycles. In Latin America in 2010 there were 2.5 new motor vehicle registrations for every new child being born.     

Cities on the move – Ten years after

The World Bank urban transport strategy review, “Cities on the Move” analyzed urban transport problems in developing and transitional economies and articulated a proposed strategy framework for national and city governments. This paper describes how the urban transport problems of the developing world have changed in the last decade and assesses the extent to which the strategies recommended in 2002 have been successfully implemented. It shows that progress has been widespread in some areas – particularly in mass transit analysis and investment and some environmental policies – and that there have developed some good planning and public transport practices in a smaller number of model cities. But more strategic institutional and policy issues, including the mobilization and regulation of private sector initiative in meeting infrastructure and public transport supply deficiencies, have tended to be poorly developed. Above all, the growth of medium sized cities with weak institutions and finance highlights the need for the international development institutions to put greater emphasis on helping those cities by dissemination of best practice in strategic transport planning and traffic management.     

Urban transport lending by the World Bank: The last decade

Over the preceding decade, the World Bank committed about US$7.5bn in loans for urban transport projects in its client countries, involving total project costs of nearly US$13bn. Projects are designed by the client city/national governments and the World Bank in an interactive, give-and-take process. As is common in development finance, urban transport projects entail an investment program and a set of policy and institutional initiatives. A majority of Bank-funded operations in this period focused on public transport modes. A clear and overarching strategic thrust is evident, favoring private delivery of services with a strong public role through city-specific regulatory agencies. Depending on the context, projects involved efforts to introduce private operators and competition into an all-public set-up, or tighten up weakly regulated, “informal” public transport markets. A notable feature of many projects in the latter context is the use of investments in bus rapid transit infrastructure to reach multiple goals: improve transport services, maintain affordability for low-income passengers, attract new passengers, reduce negative environmental impacts, and leverage complementary reforms of policies and institutions. The Bank’s program in China, unique in its local context of a dynamic urban society moving away from a near-universal reliance on bicycles, initially did not focus on public transport but on urban roads and traffic management. Towards the end of the last decade, the motorization process and the outlook of decision makers entering a more mature stage, projects in China started to converge towards what the rest of the Bank’s program was doing – searching for a more sustainable path to urban transport development.     

Transantiago: A tale of two cities

The Chilean government decided to modernize Santiago's entire public transport system, integrating the underground and the private bus networks based on a structure of trunk and feeder services, and a fare-payment by touchless smart card. The new, integrated transit system, known as Transantiago, very soon ran into serious problems that alienated much of its user base and significantly lowered the government's approval ratings. This paper recounts how Transantiago was planned and designed and then discusses its evolution after implementation. It concludes with suggestions for the Transantiago authorities and lessons to be learned from this traumatic process.     

Putting our money to good use: Can we attract more passengers without increasing subsidies?

This paper evaluates the policy of Swedish public transport authorities, determining whether the number of trips on local public transport could have been increased without increasing subsidies. Based on annual data from Swedish counties, the evaluation found that between 1986 and 2001 public transport fares exceeded the passenger-maximising fare most of the time in all but two counties, the average deviation being 1-215%. Evaluating the alternative, passenger-maximising policy, including both fare and service changes for 2001, demonstrated that demand for local public transport in Swedish counties could have been increased by 0-178% without increasing subsidies. Aggregated, this represents a 2.3% increase in the number of trips on local public transport in Sweden.     

What’s so funny about peace, love and transport integration?

The 1998 White Paper proposed integration as the solution to Great Britain’s land transport problems. Most commentators agree that this much vaunted New Deal for Transport has been a failure. Yet some ten years later policy papers from bodies such as the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Centre for Cities are still proposing integration as a possible panacea.There are a number of reasons for the failure of integrated transport over the last decade. The first is the failure to define the concept. The second is the failure to operationalise the concept. The third is the lack of an evidence base on the success of integrated transport policies. Evidence is now emerging in Britain on the benefits (and indeed the costs) of some aspects of integrated transport policies. The fourth, and perhaps the most crucial, is the lack of will in terms of politicians, civil servants and the public at large, to adopt the behavioural changes necessary for an integrated transport policy to be successful. A series of organisational and funding changes are proposed that could advance the prospects for integration.     

Overview of public transport policy developments in South Africa

Public transport in South Africa is one of the most burning issues in the transport sector. The government is faced with huge public pressure to improve public transport systems in the face of rising fuel costs, the pending implementation of expensive urban toll road systems in the Gauteng province, and elsewhere in urban environments, public transport safety issues, public transport fleet renewal, especially the commuter rail services, as well as limited resources to fund public transport. As a developing country, the South African Government has pressing funding issues such as funds needed to improve housing for the poor to improve schooling and public health services. Government is also faced with a vocal minibus taxi industry that transports an estimated 65% of all commuters in the country that is also insisting on subsidies for its services.     

Mumbai lunch box delivery system: A transferable benchmark in urban logistics?

This paper presents findings of a freight transport study carried out for Mumbai city (India). Based on the case study of lunch box delivery system organized by the Mumbai dabbawalas, demonstrated that an informal sector was capable of developing an urban logistics system that was precise, reliable and affordable to the middle class society in Mumbai. These facts suggest an approach based on adapting logistics solutions harmoniously to the urban landscape, public policy, infrastructure and skill sets of the company’s employees in order to be attractive to the end customer, offering a good match between supply and demand i.e., consumer and producer satisfaction. At the same time logistics solutions should evolve continuously in order to be attractive to the core customer base and should be customer driven. These basic management principles can be applied in the management of other urban logistics companies in the world over.     

Quality incentives and quality outcomes in procured public transport - Case study Stockholm

Gross contracts appear to be the most common contract form for procured public transport in Sweden and elsewhere. This contract form, it has been argued, gives weak incentives for operators to deliver the desired quality level. Therefore many procuring public transport authorities amend contracts with quality incentives.This paper examines how such quality incentives influence quality outcomes with focus on cancelled departures and delays. The main findings are that the introduction of quality incentives are correlated with both increases and decreases of measured quality outcomes.We hypothesise that the results are driven by underlying cost changes for achieving desired quality objectives that exceed the possible revenues from the incentives. In interviews with the Stockholm public transport authority (SL) and some operators, two central observations surface. The first is that there are causes for quality failures that are not solely the responsibility of operators and that these are therefore not fully reached by the incentives, and the second is that the operators believe that they have exhausted what they can do under the current contracts.     

Comparisons of urban transport sustainability: Lessons from West and North Africa

The diagnosis for urban transport sustainability depends on the context of different regions worldwide. We focus in this paper on West and North Africa which reveal similarities but also structural differences which are explored further. The importance of paratransit in its various forms is strongly observed in sub-Saharan Africa and to a lesser extent in North Africa. The attempts to regulate and organise this sector have been difficult; one interesting experience in Dakar occurred during a programme of fleet renewal. In parallel it is observed that there are positive but insufficient experiences of public transport authorities in some cities (Dakar, Abidjan) and similar projects postponed in other cities because of the institutional problems. One also observes the constant difficulties of designing sustainable schemes for bus companies. An answer to this crisis has been found in North Africa, through investment in new mass transport systems. However, mass transport projects in West Africa are very weak in comparison. The gap between public transport costs and income levels there remains a major obstacle to sustainable mobility exacerbated by the poverty of a significant part of the urban population in West Africa. Two other critical factors are also identified affecting sustainable mobility requirements, namely, the urban sprawl and increasing energy costs. Finally the conclusion recommends the use of research and expertise networks in order to help the design and the implementation of suited solutions.     

Incorporation of customer satisfaction in public transport contracts – A preliminary analysis

The design of public transport contracts provides an opportunity to define service quality standards to which an operator can be held accountable. While the specification of service quality standards is a common practice, the relationships between the specifications and customer satisfaction are often methodologically unclear. Based on a South African case study, the paper uses data collected from a group of passengers who have personal cars but choose to use public transport, and a control group of passengers who only use their cars, in the same corridor as the user group, to estimate a service quality conjoint model. The model is used to evaluate the effect of different public transport service packages, defined in terms of different combinations of service attributes, on passenger satisfaction. The paper confirms the need to classify service attributes in terms of their relative impact on passenger satisfaction, at the service design stages, where performance in respect of some attributes has a disproportionate impact on satisfaction, especially where public transport is competing directly with private transport. Practical applications and limitations of the methodology are also discussed.     

Promoting social inclusion in a deregulated environment: Extending accessibility using collective taxi-based services

Bus based public transport has enjoyed revitalisation in many urban areas but outside large towns and cities its provision and quality remains erratic. Many rural settlements have infrequent services giving rise to social exclusion through transport disadvantage.The UK Government highlighted a need in Towards a Sustainable Transport System (2007) for radical new thinking on rural accessibility to help meet goals of quality of life and accessibility for all and to help meet the challenge in finding carbon friendly ways of meeting rural transport needs. This paper reports work undertaken for the Commission for Integrated Transport, an advisory body to UK Government, on how shared taxi-schemes could be developed within a deregulated environment to meet rural accessibility needs. This is based on an analysis of institutional barriers and comparison between successful mainland European schemes and UK schemes. The paper considers economic viability and the levels of subsidy currently used to provide accessibility in rural areas to show the potential for making current expenditure on rural transport in the UK ‘work harder’ to deliver a collective taxi-based service as part of the public transport mix so as to increase rural accessibility.     

Securing public values in public transport projects: Four Dutch cases on innovation

Public transport projects, like its operations, most often have a substantial dependence on public funding. The rationale behind the public contribution is that governments on different levels want to secure certain public values by supporting public transport, e.g., mobility, accessibility, sustainability, social inclusion. These are all public values that public transport, projects and operations are expected to support. Evaluations show that the outcomes of the projects are often different than expected. The goal of the research described here was to understand what happens to the public values during the process of project realisation. Four Dutch projects were researched: ZuidTangent (a bus rapid transit project near Schiphol); ParkShuttle (a people mover near Rotterdam); Phileas (guided bus rapid transit near Eindhoven); and RandstadRail (a light rail conversion near The Hague). All the projects were initiated with innovation as one of the key elements/values. Moving away from the traditional ante-post analysis, we saw patterns in the way in which public values shift during the project. First, the projects under study show how too much focus on innovation can harm the project. Second, we see crowding out of values; high ambitions of key values during the early phases of the project lead to neglect of values which were not key to the project. Third, although more innovation was a key reason to introduce competition in the governance of Dutch public transport, it became apparent that introducing competition has complicated execution of these innovative projects significantly.     

Solving procurement problems in public transport: Examining multi-principal roles in relation to effective control mechanisms

Despite the EU’s increasing role in regulating public transport procurement, few studies have considered this aspect when analysing procurement problems of public transport. This paper examines how the institutional relationships between different actors, including international governmental bodies, in public transport effects the possibility of exerting control over a county public transport authority (PTA) in a multi-principal setting. The analysis is carried out using empirical material from an infringement process including a Swedish PTA and the EU. The conclusions have clear policy implications for the procedural order when exerting control over the PTA in cases of procurement problems. It is for example shown, that the implementation process would be much more efficient if the regulations allowed the EU to impose sanctions directly towards the local authorities without having to involve the national government when the procurement laws are violated.     

Workshop 6: The public agenda: What is working and what is missing

Workshop 6 topics covered social inclusion, the informal transport sector, transport in developing countries and sustainability. The strong connections and complimentary goals were noted, where solutions to social exclusion and greenhouse gas reduction can both be realised with good transport and urban planning. There is an opportunity for developing countries to avoid the transport mistakes in many developed countries, such as car dependence. This will involve the development of infrastructure that offers accessible public transport to the majority of people, providing resources to the informal transport system and integrating this with public transport. The workshop considered specific issues such as rural transport, new technology, car tolls to subsidise public transport, safety issues with informal transport and the failure to evaluate the longer-term impacts of many major transport infrastructure developments. Recommendations were made in relation to research and policy and future Thredbo topics.     

Public transport policy for central-city travel in the light of recent experiences of congestion charging

Excellent public transport which makes the private car a minority mode of central-city travel is a necessary condition for a political process towards the introduction of congestion charges. However, the charging system costs in London and Stockholm have proved to be unexpectedly high. Therefore, before these costs come down to an affordable level, zero-fares for central-city travel and stricter parking policy would be a first-best combination in many cities, always provided that the public transport is really competitive. A bold venture in public transport development is consequently the top priority irrespective of the transport pricing policy direction.     

Flexible transport services: A new market opportunity for public transport

The term Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT) has been increasingly applied in the last 10 years to a niche market that replaces or feeds (usually via small low floor buses or taxis) conventional transport where demand is low and often spread over a large area. More recently, the concept of DRT as a niche market has been broadened to include a wider range of flexible, demand-responsive transport services and is increasingly referred to as Flexible Transport Services (FTSs). The contention of this paper is that well-implemented FTS has the potential to revitalise bus-based public transport services which are traditionally based on fixed networks with variable geographical coverage and levels of service.     

The efficiency of public transport operations – An evaluation using stochastic frontier analysis

The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of public transport operations undertaken in Swedish counties by the Public Transport Authorities (PTA), taking into account the substantial differences in operating conditions between counties. The analysis will be performed using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) with annual data from 1986 to 2009 for 26 Swedish counties. The analysis shows how the efficiency of the individual counties has changed over time. The results are used to provide a ranking (in terms of efficiency) of the Swedish public transport authorities that can provide a basis for benchmarking. It is concluded that the efficiency of the public transport providers in all counties fell during the observed time period. Defining cost efficiency as the ratio of minimum cost to observed cost, the overall (average) cost efficiency for the industry fell from 85.7% in the eighties to 60.4% for the period from 2000 to 2009. Possible explanations for the development include increased emphasis on route density as well as higher environmental and safety requirements.     

Growing patronage - Challenges and what has been found to work

This paper synthesizes evidence on growing public transport patronage. The paper firstly examines barriers to patronage growth before reviewing evidence on endogenous factors (those within the control of operators and regulators) and exogenous factors (those factors such as socio-economic influences which are not controlled by regulators/operators) which affect public transport patronage. Suggested barriers include capacity, network transfers, perceptions and investment/subsidy needs. Evidence is presented suggesting that reliability, service levels and fares are the principal tools to adopt in growing patronage. Car ownership, income and population growth, employment and urban sprawl are amongst the exogenous factors identified as influencing patronage.     

Hybrid urban transport systems in developing countries: Portents and prospects

Some South African cities have initiated public transport transformation projects which, in most cases, ultimately envisage the in toto replacement of paratransit operations with formalised BRT systems. There are two likely outcomes: (1) complex negotiations with existing operators and budget constraints will result in the in toto transformation occurring over an extended period of time; or (2) in toto transformation will simply not occur. In either case, cities will depend, for decades, on a ‘hybrid’ public transport system that combines both formal and paratransit operators. This paper presents a case for policy recognition of hybrid systems, and explores how such systems might best be managed. The following categories of hybrid public transport systems are explored through case studies: (1) transformative processes in which paratransit operators are to form or assimilate into companies to operate new services, but this incorporation has proved difficult to complete and the operational and regulatory frameworks remain unchanged; and (2) transformative processes that, from the outset, anticipated a hybrid system and designed the outcome accordingly. A third category of hybrid transport systems, defined as transformative processes that have been amended following a realisation that in toto transformation is unattainable, is also introduced and discussed. The paper concludes by tentatively drawing lessons for appropriate public transport regulation, particularly with respect to Cape Town's transformation project. It is argued that a review of the current national regulatory framework is required to enable possible project modifications that acknowledge system hybridity. It is suggested that regulatory frameworks that accommodate the likely hybrid nature of public transport system outcomes have greater prospects of success than frameworks that do not. Furthermore, it is argued that contextually appropriate and successful public transport transformation projects do not necessarily require the in toto substitution of incumbent paratransit operators, and that they can be integrated with, and complement, formal services.