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Each week, more than 1 million people move from rural areas to cities around the world, placing huge demands on existing infrastructure—and especially on existing transport systems. Booming cities need contemporary mobility systems capable of transporting increasing numbers of people while doing the least possible harm to the natural environment. Multiple actors, including national and local governments, must work together to create environmentally and financially sustainable urban transport systems.

The Makings of a Mobility Crisis in the New Urban Age

• Cities consume 60–70 percent of the world’s energy supply and emit 70–80 percent of total global carbon emissions.
   
• More than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities. Urban transport defines the access of these city dwellers to wealth and well-being.
   
• Countries with the highest rates of urbanization also have high rates of personal motorization, which in turn leads to more carbon emissions. This will continue to contribute to catastrophic climate change if cities do not develop more sustainable transportation options.
   
• Some countries have difficulty executing their national urban transport policies due to fragmented local authority, weak financial regulation, poor project decisions, and inadequate performance-evaluation criteria.

How Governments Can Develop Sustainable Transport Solutions

Set and enforce an expansive, long-term vision for sustainable urban mobility at the national level. The national government should coordinate authority, organize power, and promote cooperation across the various tiers of government to achieve this vision.

Augment local governments’ capacity to implement projects that further the overarching sustainable transport vision. At the national level, local mobility plans should be mandated to align with national transport goals, affirm local ownership of projects, and implement practices to improve the knowledge and motivation of staff on the ground.

Establish clear funding and financing channels for transport systems. Governments should coordinate regional, local, and private contributions as well as federal financial-assistance programs.

Improve project development and selection. The government should set concrete national standards around data collection and provide localities with methodology to evaluate project outcomes according to various performance indicators, including equity, safety, and environmental impacts.

Generate comprehensive cost-benefit analyses at the local level for proposed projects. These analyses should address social, environmental, and economic issues relevant to the local context and include specific, confirmed funding sources for all projects and initiatives.

Chapter 1: Cities, People, Cars, and Climate

In 2010, the world experienced a great transition—more than 50 percent of people lived in cities for the first time in human history. Each week, more than 1 million rural residents, or two times the population of The Hague, move to cities around the globe. Over the next four decades, billions of people will continue to migrate to urban areas until more than 75 percent of the global population lives in cities.

An enormous amount of infrastructure is needed to accommodate this growth in urban areas—estimated to cost over $350 trillion in new investment when usage of that infrastructure is taken into account.¹ The urban population is growing so quickly that housing, transportation, energy, and water systems need to be built simultaneously, ideally in an integrated way, to provide the greatest public access while doing the least harm to the natural environment for as long as possible. Of that investment, $33 trillion is required to move people and goods, and an additional $169 trillion is needed for private and commercial real estate development that will support the growing population.²

Each week, 1 million rural residents move to cities around the globe.

This alone highlights the compelling need to identify new sources and types of innovative financing, from both domestic and international financial institutions, to underwrite such a historic migration. More importantly, it calls for policies to guide development so as to promote sustainability and equity.

The resource needs and resulting economic output of cities are tremendous. Cities already account for 66 percent of total world energy use—a share that may increase to 80 percent within the next thirty years. In the United States, cities represent over 70 percent of direct energy use and generate over 75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Productivity, and in turn energy demand, is concentrated in urban areas worldwide. Cities generate 80 percent of today’s global GDP.³ And because economic activity is closely linked to energy consumption and thus carbon output, cities represent 70 to 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. To take advantage of their economic potential and minimize their environmental harm globally, cities must be managed intelligently.

Historically, cities were created for mutual defense as well as for market exchange. Transportation was by foot or oxcart, so trade required the dense clustering of populations. However, as regional and national states came into existence and took over the job of civil defense, cities grew organically, though they were still limited in scale.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, and soon transportation included canals, steamboats, rail, transit, and, finally, private motorized transport. National policy in urban development, which became more common in this era of industrialization, took the form of managing land use and waste and building some infrastructure to protect the public from potentially toxic industrial activities. It also worked to secure people’s basic needs, such as access to clean water.

Cities represent 70 to 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

As fossil fuel engines took over the job of moving people and goods, cities spread out across the landscape. Sprawl—a type of growth first observed in the United States that uses the private car as the primary determinant of wholesale land use and transportation needs—is a direct result of national policies that subsidize single-family-home housing, manage land poorly, and prioritize highways over other types of transportation. The practices in planning that led to sprawl have become standard in the United States, and aspects of such policy, such as designing highways to solve urban congestion problems instead of planning for alternative mobility systems, have become the norm worldwide.

Sprawl has created long-standing problems in terms of human health, economic development, the natural environment, and climate change on a national basis. The social and environmental costs, such as public health expenditures on obesity, respiratory illness, and other ailments associated with auto-centric planning, have exceeded the available resources of individual cities. These new challenges have transformed urban growth and development from a concern of cities alone to an issue of vital importance to national governments.

National governments face a number of common challenges in the development of their primary centers of economic growth and their primary vehicles for promoting their citizens’ common aspirations for a better quality of life—their cities. Development that is sustainable in that it safeguards long-term economic, environmental, and social priorities is paramount to realizing these aspirations given the pressures that arise from rapid urban growth. Burgeoning cities need sustainable mobility systems now, and the opportunity to build infrastructure should not be at odds with the opportunity to guarantee continued prosperity.

Sprawl is a direct result of national policies that subsidize single-familyhome housing, manage land poorly, and prioritize highways over other types of transportation.

There are four primary areas of concern for sustainable urban transport policy: strengthening national leadership and reinforcing sustainable outcomes, empowering localities, using funding and financing structures to guide local action, and maximizing the project-development process to ensure successful execution of urban-transport efforts. These core concerns emerged from discussions with policymakers in large countries confronting the task of constructing sustainable transport for the booming urban populations that have resulted from rapid industrialization and economic growth.

But nation-city partnerships have historically struggled to achieve common goals. There is no single set of national urban transport policies that, if rigorously studied, broadly adopted, and effectively applied, guarantees a successful result. It is possible, however, to examine lessons learned from such nation-city partnerships around the world. Taken in sum, stories from more mature economies dominate because they have the most attempts, mistakes, and lessons learned (though that is not to suggest that solutions cannot be found elsewhere).

More People, More Cars

How well a country manages its cities will determine its global competitiveness, especially for cities that are experiencing urban population growth from industrialization. Pressure from today’s growth raises the stakes. Over the last few decades, increasing numbers of rural workers have migrated en masse to urban agglomerations to seek economic opportunities and basic services. Greater Mumbai alone almost doubled in population in ten years. In 2001, the population was only 12,877,470. In 2011, it swelled to 21,753,486,⁴ an unanticipated boom.

How well a country manages its cities will determine its global competitiveness.

Urban areas across the globe have expanded in relation to overall population growth. In China, where total GDP is among the highest in the world, the urban population’s annual growth rate is 2.3 percent, more than four times the national annual growth rate of the total population. In India, the annual growth rate of the urban population is double that of the national growth rate of the total population. The urban population boom is highest in countries like China and India,⁵  where existing cities have the fastest-growing populations and where there will be the greatest number of new cities with more than 750,000 inhabitants by 2050.⁶ For Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, the urban population is already a clear majority of the population. The Brazilian population is 87 percent urban. In Mexico, this figure is 78 percent, and in the United States it is 82 percent.

Though urban workers contribute significantly to their country’s economic success, swiftly growing urban populations can overwhelm existing infrastructure and services, especially transport systems. To get to work and school, and to access other services, urban dwellers need to be able to easily traverse the city and get wherever they need to go.

Moreover, global energy demand is projected to grow an average of 2.2 percent per year until 2020, and rapidly growing developing countries account for 85 percent of that growth. China alone represents one-third of total energy-demand growth. This stems mainly from high demand for cars and appliances among the newly emerging middle class (see table 1).⁷

Passenger cars and light-duty trucks have been the greatest sources of transport-related carbon in the world for the last two decades. Escalating demand for private cars in particular contributes to increasing amounts of transport-related carbon.

A complex regime of culture, business interests, and policies reinforces the preference for private cars and, distressingly, it is common for urban transport policy worldwide to be hindered by policies that work at cross-purposes. Rapid motorization, noted by the rise of car ownership and the increase in distances traveled by car, especially in developing countries, can result from rising levels of income, national economic-growth strategies rooted in auto manufacturing,⁸ the entrenched social perception of the private car as a status symbol, or the failure of cities to provide viable alternatives to personal motorization.⁹ As each country’s economy develops, increases in per capita income make personal motorization possible for more urban households.

Vehicles are traveling greater distances in the developing world, and the number of miles they cover threatens to grow exponentially as car ownership increases.¹⁰ It seems as if the rest of the world is trying to catch up to the United States, which possesses the highest car-ownership rates in the world at 802 vehicles per 1,000 people.¹¹

Based on the experience of the United States, all this encourages national investment in infrastructure that supports car use, such as fuel-supply systems (gas stations) and car-priority street designs like wider streets, narrower sidewalks, and more on-street parking and parking lots. And when cities do not provide effective public transit or safe spaces to walk or bike, urban dwellers increasingly turn to cars, the most energy-consuming form of transportation.

This pattern is now appearing in China, Brazil, Mexico, and other large countries that have available land and new development opportunities. In Brazil, the Ministry of Finance heavily supports auto manufacturing and road infrastructure in order to create jobs and spur economic growth. A similar policy exists in China, yet both countries also have national policies espousing sustainable transport. Countries that have not yet reached this level of car ownership have an opportunity to reduce the demand for cars by providing other types of transportation infrastructure.

When cities do not provide effective public transit or safe spaces to walk or bike, urban dwellers increasingly turn to cars, the most energy-consuming form of transportation.

Developing countries in which the automobile becomes the preferred mode of transport risk adopting the American pattern of carbon waste. Until recently, the United States was the largest emitter of carbon per capita, and 31 percent of carbon emissions is directly correlated to the nation’s auto-dependent transport system.12  It continues to be the greatest emitter of on-road, transportation-related carbon.¹³ To avoid catastrophic climate change, cities worldwide must pursue a different and more sustainable path of transportation development.

Global car ownership is expected to triple by 2050, and transport-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are projected to increase by 57 percent worldwide between 2005 and 2030. The transportation sector in Asia and Latin America is the fastest growing in terms of emissions and will contribute the largest share of the global increase in transport-related CO2 emissions.¹⁴

The transition to more sustainable transport systems needs to happen now, before infrastructure investment locks in automobile dependence. Rapidly growing urban populations with higher levels of GDP per capita correlate to higher rates of car-ownership growth (see figure 1). The fastest-urbanizing countries—China and India—lead in per capita GDP growth rates, at 8.8 percent per capita GDP in China and 4.9 percent per capita GDP in India. They also have the highest growth rates for auto ownership.¹⁵ Based on 2005 figures, by 2030 China and India will hold 390 million and 156 million of the world’s projected fleet of two billion cars, respectively, as compared to the 78 million and 20.8 million they held in 2010.¹⁶

A Sustainable Approach

Given the far-reaching effects that transportation has on energy consumption and carbon emissions, sustainable transport systems will be a key building block for future thriving cities. Sustainability is a general term that encompasses economic, environmental, and social factors. A sustainable approach therefore includes social benefits, such as reducing fatalities related to traffic, as well as long-term economic development goals. According to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) focused on environmentally sustainable transport, sustainable urban transport “provides efficient access to goods, services, job markets, and social connections while limiting short- and long-term adverse consequences for environmental, social, and economic services and systems.”¹⁷ 

This approach differs from business-as-usual transportation planning that tends to focus on road-capacity expansion and maximizing the distance and speed of vehicle movement. To manage growing urban populations and maintain economic growth, urban transport systems need to be sustainable and offer multiple ways of moving about a city, not just facilitate the flow of traffic.

A three-part strategy can help ensure a sustainable approach to urban mobility. The first priority of this approach entails avoiding carbon-intensive mobility systems, such as private-vehicle use. Shifting to multimodal systems, such as public transport, walking, and biking, constitutes the second priority, while the third involves improving existing infrastructure, vehicle technology, and fuels.

To avoid catastrophic climate change, cities worldwide must pursue a different and more sustainable path of transportation development.

This strategic approach enhances performance by targeting both the supply of and demand for transport. It allows cities to build on existing infrastructure and offers them more mobility options when selecting specific technology in which to invest.

Mobility systems do not just ensure access to opportunities and basic services for urban citizens; they also have the potential to meet long-term national and global concerns of economic growth, environmental protection, and prosperity. Any such framework, however, requires strong, cooperative governance from the locality and the national government.

The urgent need to integrate sustainability concerns into the management of cities creates room for a higher level of government to instigate the shift. In fact, fulfilling goals across all localities necessitates strong national leadership and clear guidance toward a more sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous urban future. Such leadership can create a clear framework for local governance and a clear charter for nation-municipality (and state-municipality) relationships.

Integrating Sustainability Into Transportation

While urban areas with relatively more wealth can lead the pack, as a whole, cities cannot construct sustainable transport systems alone. Creating these systems requires the simultaneous cooperation, construction, and funds of multiple actors, including the national government. Such an endeavor demands significant resources and coordination. For instance, municipal budgets may lack adequate funds for multiyear infrastructure investments and need assistance from national budget allocations or other outside sources. A position of authority higher than the city level may also be needed to compel cooperation between local agencies or help maintain a focus on broader economic, environmental, and social goals. Higher-level involvement can also prevent projects in specific situations from being driven by purely parochial interests that could potentially keep them from achieving the goal of sustainability.

Fulfilling sustainability outcomes in cities demands national as much as city leadership. National-level leadership is required to grow an economy that creates and maintains value and equitable growth for all members of society. National policy can protect the environment by encouraging economic growth with social benefits through intelligent management and protection of natural resources, both of which could also reduce conflict over resources between regions or localities. Further, safeguarding the well-being of both current and future generations requires national policy to set long-term goals and redistribute resources that would support or supplement local efforts to provide equal opportunity and ensure a generally good quality of life for populations.

Without national policy to level the playing field, localities that pursue progressive sustainability policies could be negatively impacted by less sustainable policies in other localities,¹⁸ resulting in a net negative impact on the entire country. National-level governance can prevent those localities avoiding regulation from negatively affecting the rest of the country. Beyond preventing the flow of negative impacts from one locality to another, national policy can further encourage or reinforce positive local efforts.

National policy can organize the hierarchy of power, set long-term objectives, and then supplement or support local efforts to ensure that sustainable transport goals are met. It augments the strength of cities because it can redistribute resources and supplement funding so all regions are supported appropriately to facilitate the best and most transparent system to implement sustainable transport.

Newly minted national-level urban transport policies attest to the recognition by federal governments of the need for sustainable urban transport, but success varies widely across nations and between regions. Though national policy in each country takes different forms, Brazil, China, India, and Mexico are all grappling with the challenges of implementation at various stages of development (see table 2).

Countries with long-standing national transportation policies, like the United States, would benefit from updated policy based on shifting demographics and the growth of on-road transport carbon, especially in the short term.¹⁹ Even the European Union (EU), which contains some of the most mature multimodal transportation systems, needs to rethink its regional cohesion goals and its supranational and national policy issues as they relate to the development of urban areas.

Across the world, the transition from a rural to a majority-urban world requires cooperation in the management of urban growth that now exceeds anything yet experienced. Cities new and old have newfound pressures from billions of urban dwellers seeking to make a brighter future. Urban transport will define their access to wealth and well-being.

Chapter 2: Leading for Sustainable Urban Transport

Strong national-level governance is necessary to sustainably manage rapidly growing urban populations and global economic and environmental challenges. It is particularly necessary to prevent the construction of infrastructure that will become obsolete or incompatible with long-term economic and environmental concerns. To avoid locking in infrastructure in this way, a new policy approach to and a nation-city partnership for mobility systems are needed.

Strong national-level governance is necessary to sustainably manage rapidly growing urban populations and global economic and environmental challenges.

Governance structures inherently define authority. With multiple levels of governance, conflicts over power frequently arise. Nations with federal, state, and local tiers of government—such as Brazil, India, Mexico, and the United States—typically emphasize the state’s power over the city’s. In highly centralized countries, like China, complications arise when national structural policies hinder local growth (see table 3).

There are hundreds of cities in most countries, plus a significant number of state or provincial governments, all of which have incongruent, locally contextualized desires. As these numbers continue to grow, the need for a clear organization of power and coordination becomes stronger.

Coordination between levels of government can be tricky, especially for sustainability. Each tier of government has different outlooks on its priorities, made more arduous by the limitations on its ability to influence or define different areas of taxation, regulation, and development priorities. By clearly organizing power across these various levels, national governments could reduce friction at the local level to support local projects, especially on sustainable urban transport policies across multiple tiers, coordinate local desires, and balance long-term and short-term goals across the levels of government.

The most significant role national governments can play is to set the vision for sustainable transportation from which the roles, responsibilities, outcomes, and priorities can flow. But more is needed. Setting up institutions and establishing governmental authority at the level that is best suited to provide a coordinated perspective across the entire urban transport system is critical to any national vision’s sustainability and, in turn, to the sustainability of the mobility network in its entirety.

While national policy sets the broad context in which urban transport systems should be executed, national leadership can empower localities to translate and apply national regulations. Policy initiatives taken by the national government should work to empower local or regional authorities while providing clear conditions on the expected outcomes. National policy must work to organize roles and levels of authority, support regional planning, and engage multiple stakeholders in achieving a vision for sustainable urban transport from the outset. Cooperation at the national, regional, and local levels is critical to enforcing the foundation of national urban mobility policy—the vision.

Set a National Vision for Sustainable Mobility

A few of the world’s largest countries—Brazil, India, and Mexico—have relatively new urban mobility laws that incorporate the three pillars of sustainability, but all have had difficulty executing and enforcing those laws. Weak local action and the slow deployment of funding plague implementation, but pressure to take action is mounting. Brazil must prepare for an inundation of visitors to the upcoming World Cup and subsequent Olympic Games. India’s urban migration outpaces the government’s ability to provide enough basic services. Mexico’s cities are burdened with air pollution as well as the basic need to provide adequate services for its millions of urban inhabitants (see table 4).

“Lack of institutional capacity” is the most frequently cited culprit for the shortcomings of national governments’ ability to facilitate strong local action. Institutional capacity refers to weak processes, structures, and policies that lead to ineffective management or insufficient direction to create sustainable urban transport systems. To address this and build a strong institutional framework, effective management processes and structures must flow from a national vision for sustainable urban transport.

A vision can include intended social, economic, and environmental outcomes that recognize a transportation system’s impact on land use, health, environment, equity, social cohesion, and economic opportunities and returns. It can reset conventional, unsustainable practices in mobility, such as building roads without thought to destinations, and push transport policy in a new direction. And a vision provides the “common, universal goals or outcomes.”²⁰

A strong vision that is applied to urban contexts, as demonstrated by India’s recently developed National Urban Transport Policy (part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission), is intended to guide investment in an integrated fashion. Specifically geared toward achieving sustainable outcomes, the National Urban Transport Policy outlines a fundamental shift that clearly prioritizes moving people over moving vehicles. This policy articulates the change in priority by stating the centrality of “incorporating urban transportation as an important parameter at the urban planning stage rather than being a consequential requirement; encouraging integrated land use and transport planning; . . . bringing about a more equitable allocation of road space with people, rather than vehicles, as its main focus; . . . enabling the establishment of quality focused multi-modal public transport systems; . . . [and] reducing pollution levels through changes in traveling practices.”²¹ The language employed sets the broad parameters by which all of India’s urban-transport actors can respond appropriately.

Maximize Sustainability by Advancing Regional Coordination

Of course, simply having a vision is not enough. The processes and structures at the national level must be coordinated and compatible with a sustainable vision. At a minimum, clear protocols guiding coordination between social, economic, and environmental ministries at the national level must exist. For instance, in Europe, transport issues are often addressed holistically with environment, energy, or other infrastructure issues under one ministry’s roof, and there is additional coordination with national land-use and natural-resources ministries. To overcome the challenge of multilevel, multi-agency coordination, many countries simply need to add capacity to institutions at the national level to carry out the vision.

Moreover, though India has established ideal language for an effective policy, the highly fragmented nature of local urban management causes many of its urban mobility projects to languish. Thus, national policy must also organize and strengthen institutional authority at regional and local levels to further sustainability goals in urban transport.

A national-level program that has recognized the effectiveness of regional and local authorities and successfully created more accountability is the United States’ Partnership for Sustainable Communities, a collaboration between the federal agencies for transportation, environmental protection, and affordable housing. This program allows communities to apply for federal grants without state approval so long as they provide a cost-benefit analysis. A separate Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, funded by