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Recapturing the streets: a vision of equitable and sustainable urban transport

Why have planners failed to provide safe, affordable and environmentally sustainable transport for the two billion residents of developing country cities? Is transport policy too dependent on Northern technical and economic reasoning? What can be done to halt the export of the Western model of automobile dependence to developing countries?

A book from a Director of the National Association of Public Transport in Brazil highlights the failures of current transport policies and the need to include social and political considerations when planning and managing transport systems. Setting out to bridge the artificial divide between ‘technical’ and ‘social’ sciences, it emphasises the importance of co-ordinating urban transport and traffic planning and meeting the formidable challenges of modifying the way we build, use and think about roads.

The author charts how the car has transformed his native São Paulo, depriving children of play spaces, confining the elderly to their homes and adding to the social polarisation which has exacerbated crime and made the city’s streets no-go zones for vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists. In São Paulo, as elsewhere, private transportation has been prioritised and local public transportation, non-motorised transport (NMT) and pedestrian traffic needs have been neglected.

The prevailing mentality has embraced mobility as a prime objective and adopted market and efficiency paradigms to propose transport solutions for hypothesised future conditions. Though presented as supposedly neutral techniques, modelling procedures have been used by planners in closed arenas not accountable to democratic scrutiny. For too long policy has been driven by assumptions about the inevitability of increased automobile or motorcycle use as a natural expression of consumer choice. Road expansion policies are therefore promoted as the most logical political answer to people's natural desires.

Among the book’s key findings are:

While road accident fatalities have decreased by a fifth in developed countries, they have risen by 300 per cent in Africa and 200 per cent in Asia. Around two thirds of developing country victims are pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
Air pollution is a chronic problem in developing country cities: as an example, the concentration of suspended particulate matter in Delhi is 20 times greater than it is in Brussels.
There is no evidence that the private sector, working within a strict market approach, has either an interest or the ability to deliver transport services to meet the needs of the majority of urban populations.

Key recommendations call on transport planners and politicians to:

ensure that transport agencies are open to community participation and public accountability and that the definition of public transport and the scope of traffic programmes are socially controlled
support NMT by providing infrastructure and facilitating circulation
submit road projects to equity and safety auditing
develop education and citizenship for road users, enforce speed and safety regulations and speedily punish those guilty of major traffic offences
complement analysis of individual trips with household travel activity and the transport needs of the poor, women and children
subsidise the fares of those whose needs are not catered to by the market.

Source(s):
‘Urban transport, environment and equity: the case for developing countries’ by E A Vasconcellos, Earthscan, 2001 Full document.
See also Brazil National Association of Public Transport (in Portuguese) Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 13 August 2002

Further Information:
Earthscan Publications Ltd
120 Pentonville Road
London
N1 9JN

Tel: 44 (0)20 7278 0433
Fax: +44 (0)20 7278 1142
Contact the contributor: earthinfo@earthscan.co.uk

Earthscan Publications Ltd

Eduardo Alcantara Vasconcellos

Contact the contributor: vascon@originet.com.br

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