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World cities research - summary report
Prepared by MVA for CfIT
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CHAIRMAN'S FOREWORD
Across the world, cities face many common transport issues. Typically they include growing traffic congestion, pollution, greater car dependency, buses caught in city congestion, and aging transport infrastructure. This in turn reduces urban quality of life, has impacts on people's health and can impede economic growth.
What is different is how cities are tackling these problems. Transport professionals have contended for a long time that when the "carrot and stick" are introduced in tandem a modal shift from car to more sustainable modes of transport can be achieved. London, Barcelona and Singapore are among the few cities in the world to have been successful in this objective.
What is clear from our World Cities study is that those cities focusing only on public transport investment have not been able to secure significant change to travel behaviour. The benefits from public transport investment in terms of fewer journeys by car and less congestion have not been sustained as the vacated road space has simply filled up with new traffic. This is why in 2002 we advocated a policy of national road pricing in order to "lock in" the benefits of public transport improvements (Paying for Road Use, 2002). We welcome the UK Government’s recent positive statements which echo this philosophy. Since 2000, London has translated this philosophy in to action to great effect, achieving a 5% shift in modal share from cars to buses. This change in travel behaviour occurred before the introduction of congestion charging, but the latter has accentuated this trend. The only other city which even comes close to this figure is Barcelona, which has seen public transport use up by 1.7% and a car use reduce by 3% between 1999 and 2002. On the other hand, the Dublin experience backs up the call for long term solutions addressing both supply and demand. While bus use in the city has increased by 40% between 1996 and 2003, the lack of car restraint measures has meant car use rose during the same period by 28%. Even a city such as Zurich, which has long had a public transport system able to deliver a high level of service, is now battling rising car use.
Even with significant investment, an increase in public transport capacity cannot keep pace with the growth in demand that is fuelled by economic and population growth. More emphasis needs to be placed on policies which achieve greater integration between transport and land use, as the continual growth in the average distance we travel is not sustainable. We see this in New York, where low density surburban sprawl, and high dependence on private car travel, corresponds with longer average journeys than other cities. In contrast, the more densely populated cities such as Barcelona have a far shorter average journey length and less dependence on motorised transport. The recent trends towards the development of suburbs as focal points in their own right for work and leisure eg (the urban villages idea in London) and around rail stations (Singapore, Perth), are a step in the right direction and need to be built upon.
There are important reasons for pursuing these policies. Studies have shown that the most popular cities are those with reduced car dependency. Whilst it goes without saying that high levels of investment in public transport need to be sustained, if this can be delivered alongside the two missing pieces of the policy jigsaw - wider application of car restraint and greater integration between transport and land use, the world’s cities would truly provide a more pleasant environment in which to live and work.
Professor David Begg,
Chair, Commission for Integrated Transport
Newman P. & Kenworthy, J. R. 1999, Sustainability and Cities: overcoming automobile dependence, Island Press, Washington DC
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