Playing Leapfrog with a Unicorn

— the battle to modernize transportation in developing countries

Recommendations:

1. Recognizing high external costs of automobile transit, the World bank and other international organization should prioritize bicycle and bi-modal forms of transportation for developing countries’ urban and peri-urban areas.

2. Significant infrastructure funds and policy support should be allocated to alternative means of personal transport such as self-driving vehicles, and electric powered bikes

3. The World Bank and other international organizations should facilitate an ideological shift away from purely public transport and car based development ideals.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of 17 global goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 for the year 2030. The Sustainable Development Goals include sustainable transport, but presently the main focus is on public transportation. Making sure there is a provision for bikes and other personal transit modes in every major transport project, changing the incentives for loans, and supporting an ideological shift away from purely car or public transit thinking would allow developing nations to leapfrog the traditional transportation development model and reduce externalities of car based design.

In the worlds’ most advanced economies a shift has occurred; car use is declining. The trend seems to be younger generations are postponing acquisition of a driver’s license. One study found, “The later people pass their test, the less far they drive even once they can, according to Gordon Stokes of Oxford University… People in Britain who learn in their late 20s drive 30% less than those who learn a decade earlier.” (The Economist, 2012). This suggests that as age distribution shifts the total number of car owners as well as total miles driven will decline. In the US the share of urban residents without a car has grown since the mid-1990’s, 13% of people in cities of more than 3m people currently have no car. And though over 50% of the population lives in suburbs, more than half the nation’s 51 largest cities are seeing more growth in the core than outside it (The Economist, 2012).

Cars present a staggering waste. On average they account for a searing 23% percent of carbon emission in OECD countries (OECD Environmental Directorate, 2011), and are the least efficient form of transit. Privately owned cars are in use on average only 4% of the time (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009). The remaining time they sit, often exploiting precious public space. Cars also take up vastly more space per person than any other form of transit. By some estimates one lane of freeway can transport 2,500 people per hour by car, 5,000 in a bus and a whopping 50,000 by train (The Economist, 2012). Cars fair even worse on in tight roads in dense cities. Cars are also one of the leading causes of deaths and injury in the world. In fact road traffic injury ranked higher than the sum of the next two forms of violence, homicide and suicide (Villaveces, 2016). It is no wonder that younger generations, in developed countries, have begun to shun the ever snowballing problems associated with vehicle ownership.

The opposite is in effect however, in some of the worlds developing cities. Car use is drastically on the rise in Beijing, China, where vehicle ownership rates have been on a steep upward trend over the past decade. Some estimates put car ownership in the city a high as 30% in 2011 up from under 5%in 2001 (Holmes, 2011). This growth, if it continued would eclipse the ownership rate in New York City estimated at just under half in 2015 (Florida & Aria, 2015), if it hasn’t already. In Bangkok a 100,000 Baht (about $2,800 USD 2014) subsidy launched in 2011 for the purchase of new vehicles drove a 10% rise in the number of vehicles on Bangkok’s roads in one year (Bangkok Post, 2013). Cities like Manila, Delhi, and Jakarta are often perceived as being as famous for their traffic as their cultural heritage.

The Business Council for Sustainable Development, an organization of major automotive and other industrial companies, warns: “The major challenge in the developing world is to avoid being choked…by the rapid growth in the number of privately owned motorized personal-transportation vehicles…[Personal mobility] is deteriorating in many areas where it had been improving in the past.” Many cities in developing countries, with a fraction of the car ownership of the United States, now experience far worse traffic congestion and pollution than exist in the United States (Sperling & Cluassen, 2002).

The externality effects of cars disproportionately impact poor households. While motorization can increase mobility and access to services such as education and health access, extreme traffic congestion which is seen in many urban environments across Asia and South America actually has the opposite effect, trapping poor in slums with little way to gain access to critical services. In addition, increased mobility has a tendency to extend the spatial layout of urban areas, inner cities become denser and more expensive, and poor get pushed to edges of an urban sprawl. With limited means for transport, the spiraling impact equates to increased cost to reach jobs, and a disproportionate share of income required to meet transportation needs. Car adoption then becomes almost a regressive income transfer on the poorest and most vulnerable. Finally, environmental impacts from automobiles, including road dust, emissions, noise, and increased risk of injury are far more problematic and carry disproportionate and inequitable impacts to poorer populations.

Car infrastructure also represents a tremendous budget outlay. New roads are expensive and are often constructed by demolition of poor neighborhoods. Highways represent barriers for integration, and environmental damage from pavement and poor drainage often acerbate environmental impacts of climate change such as flooding. Worse, car use patterns and infrastructure are inductive, so that the more infrastructure that is built, the more cars are used, and a pro-cyclical relationship develops where more spending actually makes the problem worse.

To solve the problem a significant effort will need to be made to shift the desired mode of transportation away from car use to bicycles, small electric vehicles and shared automobiles. Bicycles and electric bikes represent an extremely effective mode of transport with few external impacts. They maintain a small footprint which requires an order of magnitude less road space, allowing vastly more to occupy precious city roads. The maximum speeds are low and maneuverability high which allows better integration with pedestrian and mixed use spatial layouts. They provide a positive health impact to their users and have a negligible environmental impact. It will however be very difficult to initiate and sustain the ideological shift required to motivate a shift in primary mode of transportation. One of the primary issues is the prevalence of western, car based transport concepts in international development institutions such as the World Bank Group.

Bicycles are still a major mode of transport for many cities in emerging countries. In China, 37.2 percent of the population use bicycles (Sibilski, 2015). Walking and cycling represent up to 90 percent of trips in developing country cities, yet facilities for these modes constitute “less than one percent of the project expenditures” on transport at World Bank Group (Dimitriou & Gakenheimer, 2011). To change the perception, the calculus of investment must change. This represents a major shift in the thinking not of developing world, but primarily the development institutions. One idea would be to require infrastructure investment to be done on a comparative basis, requiring a calculation of external marginal social cost (MSC) from infrastructure projects and charging a higher interest rates for projects with high external social costs.

Another focus should be on leapfrogging the development path taken by most western countries, where expansion of infrastructure has focused mainly on increasing road capacity. Technologies such as autonomous vehicles and small motorized transport such as electric motorbikes can facilitate bi-modal transport in larger urban areas. Bicycles and Electric motorbikes actually support a more incremental development approach to urbanization in developing countries, as many users are already familiar with non-car transport. Electric motorbikes or bikes can be shared resources used to complete smaller distances between major transportation links avoiding some of the low utilization rates of end-to-end car use. For example, during planning for BRT or rail facilities, support for small localized transport can be integrated into plans. This type of design becomes ever more feasible if MSC is used in the estimation for interest rate basis. Economically this would impact project estimation in a similar manner to a carbon tax, incentivizing mixed use and equitable designs.

Shared autonomous vehicles represent another opportunity. The challenge would be great for many urban environments in developing nations, however the technology is developing rapidly. Googles autonomous vehicle group has driven 1.2 million miles, with only 1 minor (and widely publicized) crash (Google, n.d.). The technology has the ability to create 3-d maps of nearly 300 feet in a 360 radius of the vehicle. While the current intelligence of the software is not yet able to safely and effectively navigate in some of the more chaotic urban traffic environments experienced in developing countries, they could be used in more planned city’s such as China’s Tianducheng, or Kangbashi New Area, as shared resources to facilitate bi-modal transport, better connecting these cities with the parent urban areas.

The largest challenge of course is one of perception. This also is a bi-product of Western culture. In an effort to reduce the size of cars manufactures decide to offer, concepts like vehicle size related tax should be proposed by leading development agencies. This could take forms such as a ratio of internal capacity to external size. In more developed economies the regressive nature, relative to family or personal size might rightly face challenges, however in countries where family size demographics are more homogenous this poses less of an issue. The real issue might be to get support from international institutions whose sociology is focused on macro-level revenue statistics.

The Problems related to congestion in the cities of the emerging world will continue to grow faster than any investment in new roads can match. India’s motor vehicle fleet is forecast to grow from 73 million in 2005 to 364 million by 2025 (Dimitriou & Gakenheimer, 2011). Investing in facilities for cycling as a clean, healthy alternative to cars, and planning for other new technologies and forms of bi-modal transit will help reduce congestion and pollution. It will also provide access to cheap transportation in countries where up to a quarter of a person’s income is currently spent on mobility (Sibilski, 2015).

The World Bank Group already recommends the development of better infrastructure for cyclists, but too many schemes still only deal with increased accessibility to car transit or public transport that is beyond the financial means of the world’s poorest. It is time the World bank joins the trends set by the next generation to significantly support bicycle and alternative forms of transit in its funding.

Dimitriou, H. T., & Gakenheimer, R. (2011). Urban Transport in the Developing World.Edward Elgar.

Holmes, F. (2011, March 17). China’s Urbanization Is Driving Housing Demand and Car Sales. Business Insider.

OECD Environmental Directorate. (2011). OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050.OECD.

Sibilski, L. J. (2015). Cycling is Everyone’s Business.World Bank Blog.

Sperling, D., & Cluassen, E. (2002). Ther Developing Worlds Motorization Challenge. Issues in Science and Technology, 55–66.

The Economist. (2012, September 22). Seeing the back of the car.

U.S. Department of Transportation. (2009). Summary of Travel Trends, 2009 National Houselhold Travel Survey.

Villaveces, A. (2016).Americas: Focus on inequality insecurity and violence.World Bank Group.

Wall Street Journal. (2011). China Drives. Wall Street Jounal.

Related posts:

Reach your prospects who are eager to buy your products and services with our verified, validated and updated Furniture and Fixtures Executives Email List to generate many more qualified leads and…

Digital marketing has become an integral part of a business/brand growth. Its fast growth in modern business has taken traditional marketing to the backseat. Despite it’s driving force towards the…

Koji is arguably the king of fermentation. Chefs and home cooks alike are utilising it in kitchens across the world. Rising to prominence within the popular Western culinary sphere roughly a decade…