Ralph Gakenheimer

Urban mobility in the developing world

Mobility and accessibility are declining rapidly in most of the developing world. The issues that affect levels of mobility and possibilities for its improvement are varied. They include the rapid pace of motorization, conditions of local demand that far exceed the capacity of facilities, the incompatibility of urban structure with increased motorization, a stronger transport-land use relationship than in developed cities, lack of adequate road maintenance and limited agreement among responsible officials as to appropriate forms of approach to the problem. The rapid rise of motorization presents the question: At what level will it begin to attenuate for given economic and regulatory conditions? Analysts have taken various approaches to this problem, but so far the results are not encouraging. Developing cities have shown significant leadership in vehicle use restrictions, new technologies, privatization, transit management, transit service innovation, transportation pricing and other actions. Only a few, however, have made important strides toward solving the problem. Developing cities have lessons to learn from developed cities as regards roles of new technologies, forms of institutional management and the long term consequences of different de facto policies toward the automobile. These experiences, however, especially in the last category, need to be interpreted very carefully in order to provide useful guidance to cities with, for he most part, entirely different historical experiences in transportation. Continued progress in meeting the needs of the mobility problem in developing cities will focus on: (a) highway building, hopefully used as an opportunity to rationalize access, (b) public transport management improvements, (c) pricing improvements, (d) traffic management, and (e) possibly an emphasis on rail rapid transit based on new revenue techniques.

The MCMA Transportation System: Mobility and Air Pollution

As discussed in previous chapters, the rapid growth of the MCMA’s population, motor vehicle fleet, and industrial activity over the latter half of the 20th Century combined with the city’s meteorological and topographical situation has produced extraordinary levels of air pollution. The MCMA is today one of the world’s five largest cities. Until recently, it also held the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s most polluted cities, suffering from serious ozone and particulate pollution for much of the year.

Conclusions: emergent crucial themes

In this chapter, the editors compose a sense of the new directions and intensified efforts that have been generated throughout this book. The authors conclude that new globalism with participation of new intercommunication and new strong actors within the developing world (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is moving toward a collaborative perspective on global warming and environment through more holistic thinking about global transport. The new thinking entails new roles for the socially responsible use of motor vehicles and expanded roles for public transport. The new perspective recognizes the desperate need for continued and sustained growth of economic development with an increased deliberate focus on poverty. Perhaps, most of all actionable needs within the scope of this book, the need is not so much for improved techniques of design and planning as it is for improved decision-making and project implementation, and creating a capability of garnering agreement on innovations and concrete actions rather than yielding to continual indecision; all this by creating institutionally sustainable capability for planning and acting on urban transport.

Los problemas de la movilidad en el mundo en desarrollo

Interested on presenting a panoramic view about the complex relationship that existis between increase and demographic increment, the author its a wide var...

Comparison and Choice in Urban Transportation

The critical task in transportation education is deciding what to teach. Transportation problems are kaleidoscopic: viewed from slightly different angles they appear to be entirely different problems — inadequate street capacity, excessive use of private automobiles; misfitting technologies such as low-speed nonmotorized vehicles on high-speed roads, or insufficient public discipline to keep parking from obstructing traffic flow; mud and grades that make ways impassable; service agency inadequacies that make public transport very inefficient; low personal incomes that limit mobility, and so on. Each perspective on the problem requires a different approach and different skills.

Simple techniques for incorporating institutional-preference information in programming transportation investments☆

Abstract Urban transportation decisions usually involve a multiplicity of public and private institutions and actors. This paper addresses the problem of incorporating institutional preference information in a systematic manner within the methodology for evaluating transportation alternatives. An approach developed in conjunction with a procedure for programming major urban transportation network improvements in Cairo, Egypt is described. It relies on a measure of relative political desirability of alternative project combinations. Different possible types of preference information are compared as to information content and ease of implementation. Alternative analytical models of individual and group preferences towards project combinations under different preferential assumptions are specified and discussed. Finally, specifications are provided for their operational use in the application context for which they were intended.

The Question of Land-Use in the Participatory Transportation Study

The role of land development analysis and policy in urban transportation planning is currently very unclear in the United States. The relationship between land use and access has been the basis of the formal models sustaining urban transportation planning. Over the last twenty years it has gotten considerable methodological development and application in public policy studies. During the last five years, however, it has come under serious criticism. In particular, increased participation in urban transportation studies by citizens and local public officials has put marked pragmatic pressures on the role of land-use studies. The result is a different picture of policy-making than was prevalent in the earlier period of U.S. transportation planning.