Abstract
Good public transport systems are an essential part of safe, clean, and affordable transport for development. From a social perspective, public transport is often the only means of transport for the poor. Without it, they would be able to look at work opportunities only within walking distance of their homes, so public transport improves their livelihood opportunities. It also gives them greater access to education, health care, and recreation. For senior citizens, people with disabilities, and children, public transport is also their main means of mobility.
From an urban mobility perspective, public transport is far more efficient than personal motor vehicles in terms of the road space it uses up and the energy it consumes. For example, a bus carrying 40 passengers uses only 2.5 times more road space than a car carrying only 1 or 2 people. And the same bus consumes only about 3 times as much fuel as a car. Public transport is thus important for improvÂing sustainable mobility in urban areas, and it is well considered the right approach to encourage low-carbon growth in cities.
Key elements of a sustainable public transport system
A good public transport system must be easy and convenient to use. It also must be fast, safe, clean, and affordable. Seoul, Singapore, and Hong Kong are known for their excellent transport systems. Smaller citÂies like Lyon in France and Curitiba in Brazil also have very good systems. More recently, León in Mexico, Pereira in Colombia, LaÂgos in Nigeria, and Ahmedabad, Delhi & Bangalore in India have developed good sysÂtems. Many more are in the development stages.
A key feature is that they integrate multiple technologies, such as metro rail, light rail, Bus Rapid Transit, and basic bus services. A common ticket or fare card serves all the systems, making it easy for passengers to transfer from one mode to the other. Passenger information systems enable users to know when the next service is due and to understand the routes easily, and a high frequency of service reduces the hassle of a long wait for the next bus or train.
Main barriers to sustainable public transport in developing countries
An important barrier is the historical industry structure. Many counÂtries in Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa), Latin America (CoÂlombia, Peru) and Asia (Philippines, Indonesia) have bus systems that are owned and operated by a large number of small operators. Meanwhile, other countries in Asia (India, China), North America (USA, Canada), and Europe (France) have a single publicly owned entity that provides all transport services. Experience shows that neiÂther of these is the best for ensuring a good public transport system.
- Having a large number of small operators allows for low-cost services, but the quality is poor due to severe competition. Other disadvantages include dangerous driving practices, pollution, and a tendency to have too much service on profitable routes and virtualÂly no service on non-profitable routes. Meanwhile, single publicly owned entities may offer a higher quality of service but costs tend to be high and the quantity of service is often inadequate.
- There is increasing recognition that the best industry structure falls somewhere between the two. Having a single public entity that plans the network and determines the quality of service, with a small number of private operators providing services under strucÂtured contracts, allows a balancing of public good needs with the operational efficiency of the private sector. However, the historical industry structures make it difficult to undertake reforms.
- Another barrier is the financial sustainability of mass transit sysÂtems, especially metro rail. These cost a lot to build as well as to operate, and so the operating costs are not recovered through fares. It is essential to look at additional revenue sources, beyond fares, to sustain such systems.
- The social image of public transport is another barrier. In develÂoping country cities, as income levels go up, people like to demonÂstrate their enhanced income status by shifting from public modes to personal motor vehicles. The public transport system is seen as the only option for people who cannot afford their own vehicle. As a result, people tend to look down on someone who is using public transport. Getting the image of public transport right is a challenge.
Transportation Affordability: An Understanding
Affordability refers to people’s ability to purchase basic goods and services. It can be defined as the situation in which household incomes can purchase Basic Goods (housing, food, medical care, and transport), or simply that lower-income people need not worry too much about purchasing essential goods and services. Since affordability refers to a household’s ability to save money, it is particularly evident in the expenditure patterns of lower-income households, and their response to financial limitations such as reduced income or new cost burdens; for example, public transit services tend to provide affordability because they provide a fallback option to lower-income commuters when their vehicles are unavailable.
Transportation affordability means that people can purchase access to basic goods and activities (medical care, basic shopping, education, work, and socializing), which typically means that households spend less than 20% of their budgets on transport and less than 45% on transport and housing combined. This is a critical equity objective since it affects the cost burdens and opportunities available to disadvantaged people. Transportation affordability can be evaluated from several perspectives. It is affected by the number of vehicles that a household must own, the costs of owning and driving each vehicle, indirect costs such as residential parking, and the quality and costs of alternative modes such as transit ridesharing, cycling, walking, car-sharing, and taxi services.
Lower-income households tend to be particularly impacted by the costs of alternative modes since they rely on them more than households with higher incomes. Individual and community factors influence transportation affordability. People who must commute to work or school have greater transportation requirements than people who do not work or work at home. People with physical disabilities or other special needs tend to require more expensive transportation services. Many planning decisions affect transportation affordability. Modern transport planning responds well to the demands of wealthy travelers but not to the needs of the poor. Current planning supports automobile, air, and freight transport but does much less to improve affordable modes such as walking, cycling, and public transit travel, or to ensure that affordable housing is available in accessible locations. This is unfair and exacerbates economic problems since many workers find it difficult to access education and employment, and because motorized modes require costly infrastructure, impose external costs, and are resource-intensive, leading to increasing dependence on imported oil.
Affordability should be evaluated with regard to total rather than unit costs. For example, low per-gallon fuel prices provide less affordability in an automobile-dependent community where high vehicle ownership and mileage is necessary for access than high fuel prices with a more diverse transportation system and a more accessible land use pattern. In general, automobile dependency tends to increase per capita transportation costs and reduce overall transportation affordability, while smart growth can increase transportation affordability by creating more accessible land use (which reduces the amount of travel needed for basic access) and improving affordable transportation options such as public transit, ridesharing, cycling and walking. Smart Growth and TDM (Transport Demand Management) programs can help increase the prestige of affordable modes such as walking, cycling, and transit, making it more socially acceptable for residents to use them. As a result, a greater portion of household wealth is devoted to mobility in automobile-dependent communities than in communities with more balanced transportation systems.
Integration of Rural & Urban Transport System
In rural areas, the challenge is in providing connectivity to urban marÂkets for rural produce. Public transport is not needed to meet travel needs within each village. Such connectivity to urban centers, or between one village and another, need not be run at a very high frequency – a few servÂices a day are usually enough. The challenge, however, is to be able to do it at an affordable price. In urban areas, the challenge is that there are competing modes, like personal vehicles, which are unsustainable. In getting people to choose public transport over personal vehicles there are stringent quality parameters that need to be met. These relate to conÂvenience and reliability, which are not as stringent for rural-urban conÂnectivity or even for connecting one rural area to another.
Transportation Costs
Although it is possible to purchase an automobile for just a few hundred dollars, such vehicles tend to be unreliable, with high maintenance and repair costs. As a result, most lower-income motorists constantly face the risk of unaffordable vehicle repair and replacement costs. Vehicle insurance also tends to be a significant financial strain on low-income motorists. Many lower-income motorists are in higher-risk insurance categories due to age, experience, and territory rating factors, and so must pay hundreds of dollars for basic coverage. As a result, they face the choice of devoting an excessive portion of their income to vehicle insurance, driving uninsured (which is illegal in many jurisdictions), or foregoing automobile ownership.
On the other hand, low- or moderate-income household can easily and affordably satisfy their basic access needs by using a combination of walking, cycling, ridesharing, transit services, and occasional vehicle rentals. TDM strategies that improve these options, and help create multi-modal communities, can significantly increase transportation affordability.
The portion of household income devoted to transportation tends to be particularly high for lower-income households that own an automobile and low for households that do not own an automobile. These factors are generally overlooked because most statistics aggregate the two groups together, essentially hiding the excessive cost burden of vehicle ownership on poor households.
Affordability & Ways to decrease the social divide
First and foremost, if budgets for transportation are small, it is imÂportant for cities to choose a system that meets their needs. There is no point in a city choosing a high-cost system if a smaller, less expensive system could do the job. Expensive systems can be a big drain on the public budget, not only for construction costs but also for the annual operating costs.
With regard to financing, the capital costs can be supported with loans, provided there is some contribution from the promoters – typically governments. The challenge is in the operations phase when not only do the operating costs have to be met but the debt service has to be covered. Further, it is usually difficult to balance cost recovery with affordability. Public transport is often the only mode of transport available to the poor, so fares have to be low, but low fares mean that costs are not recovered.
Fortunately, several innovative methods of financing have emerged, of which the commercial exploitation of land resources owned by public transport agencies seems the most promising.
Conclusion
The world is becoming increasingly urbanized. Since 2007, more than half the world’s population has been living in cities, and that share is projected to rise to 60 percent by 2030. Cities and metropolitan areas are powerhouses of economic growth—contributing about 60 percent of global GDP. However, they also account for about 70 percent of global carbon emissions and over 60 percent of resource use. Rapid urbanization is resulting in a growing number of slum dwellers, inadequate and overburdened infrastructure and services (such as waste collection and water and sanitation systems, roads, and transport), worsening air pollution, and unplanned urban sprawl. To respond to those challenges, 150 countries have developed national urban plans, with almost half of them in the implementation phase. Ensuring that those plans are well executed will help cities grow in a more sustainable and inclusive manner. The proportion of the urban population living in slums worldwide declined by 20 percent between 2000 and 2014 (from 28 percent to 23 percent). That positive trend recently reversed course, and the proportion grew to 23.5 percent in 2018. The absolute number of people living in slums or informal settlements grew to over 1 billion, with 80 percent attributed to three regions: Eastern and South-Eastern Asia (370 million), sub-Saharan Africa (238 million), and Central and Southern Asia (227 million). An estimated 3 billion people will require adequate and affordable housing by 2030 exerting additional pressure on the existing transport systems.
Air Pollution becoming an unavoidable health hazard
Nine out of ten urban residents in 2016 were breathing polluted air—that is, air that did not meet the WHO air quality guidelines for annual mean levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) of 10 micrograms or less per cubic meter. More than half of those people were exposed to air pollution levels at least 2.5 times above the guideline value. Air quality worsened between 2010 and 2016 for more than 50 per cent of the world’s population. Central and Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the two regions that saw the largest increases in particulate matter concentrations.
In low- and middle-income countries, the air quality of 97 percent of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants did not meet air quality guidelines in 2016, compared to 49 percent in high-income countries. Ambient air pollution from traffic, industry, power generation, waste burning, and residential fuel combustion, combined with household air pollution, poses a major threat to both human health and efforts to curb climate change. More than 90 percent of air-pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, mainly in Asia and Africa.
Need for a sustainable & affordable transport system
People everywhere depend on transport and mobility systems to not only move from point A to point B, but to access economic opportunities, healthcare, food, services, and so much more. For this reason, transport systems can either make or break the liveability and affordability of cities. Governments can learn a great deal from Chile, where in 2019, a small public transport fare increase sparked nationwide protests that eventually lead to the election of a new government. While the hike in cost was simply the spark that incited a movement against wider austerity, the reverse can also be true: increased funding and support to public transport systems can be catalysts for enhanced equality and greater investments in all public services.
In so many cities, many people are forced to travel for hours to go to work (often at low-paying jobs), because living in or close to city centers is untenable and expensive. Women are especially affected by this, only further exacerbating gender inequality and poverty. While doing more on housing is an important step, efforts can also be made to increase connectivity in metropolitan areas. Transit deserts are a growing problem globally, including in developed countries like the United States, where working-class people embark on multi-modal, complex journeys of nearly two hours each way to earn, in many cases, a barely living wage.
Cities must work together with regional and national governments to expand public transport services and ensure affordability. Train and bus services, where available, should reach more communities, not only affluent ones. Where there is little to no public transport infrastructure, cities must engage informal transport providers to guarantee that services are safe and adequate and that costs are low. Very often, governments give little attention to this mode, even though in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, up to 80 percent of the population relies exclusively on informal transport services for their mobility needs. In South Africa for example, while overall investments in transport are already low, national budgets do not give proper attention to the needs of the poor. While 66.4 percent of riders use informal minibus taxis, the state only allocates 1 percent of subsidies and support.
In addition, where possible, cities should also support active mobility infrastructure. Walking and cycling, while a fun and healthy choice for people of means in city centers are often a dangerous reality for poor people throughout the world. Car-driven urban planning has resulted in road systems that give little attention to the needs of pedestrians and cyclists. For this reason, cities must ensure that when people walk or cycle, they are able to do so safely and comfortably. Sidewalks should not only exist but be well maintained and protected from motor vehicles. Trees and other forms of urban greenery should be planted for shade and to make trips even more pleasant, possibly even encouraging motorists to ditch their cars for a bike.
Public transport is an essential service for urban residents and a catalyst for economic growth and social inclusion. Moreover, with ever-increasing numbers of people moving to urban areas, the use of public transport is helping to mitigate air pollution and climate change. According to 2018 data from 227 cities, in 78 countries, 53 percent of urban residents had convenient access to public transport (defined as residing within 500 meters walking distance of a bus stop or a low-capacity transport system or within 1,000 meters of a railway and/ or ferry terminal). In most regions, the number of people using public transport rose by nearly 20 percent between 2001 and 2014. Sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind, with only 18 percent of its residents having convenient access to public transport. In some regions with low access, informal transport modes are widely available and, in many cases, provide reliable transport. Stronger efforts are needed to ensure that sustainable transport is available to all, particularly to vulnerable populations such as women, children, seniors, and persons with disabilities.
