This blog has consistently held that the two biggest challenges facing cities in India and other developing countries are transportation and affordable housing. The situation has reached a stage in many countries where it now threatens their primary engines of growth. It's therefore time to go beyond the traditional measures and introduce new thinking into public debates and policy making to address these two issues. This post will explore the case of urban transportation.
From an informative MGI report on what 25 global cities are doing to improve mobility in their cities,
The top-scoring cities... improved their road infrastructure, increased the number of bicycle lanes and pedestrian streets, and invested heavily in shared-transport schemes such as rental-bike and ride-sharing services... The Asian cities of Seoul, Shenzhen, and Singapore, for example, top the rankings for public-transport affordability, and to offset the environmental and societal costs of personal car use, these cities actively make car ownership a more expensive choice... Public-transport systems in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Shanghai are also becoming much more affordable because of government policies stimulating economic competition and technology. Cars registered outside Shanghai are barred from certain districts... Commuters enjoy the benefit of lower fares, the result of competition among multiple ride-share providers. The widespread implementation of paid parking systems in Buenos Aires and Mexico City is making private-car ownership more expensive...
Moscow's transport system has low underground waiting times, high speeds during rush hour, and a significantly above-average proportion of dedicated bus lanes. Shenzhen, too, has a high share of dedicated bus lanes, which helps with rush-hour predictability. Singapore’s electronic road-pricing system is powered by a digital device that automatically charges the driver the road toll when the car passes through a gantry, enabling frictionless road travel for both private and public vehicles, even during peak times... Istanbul has risen in the convenience rankings with a significantly improved ticketing system using QR-code payments. The city has also introduced the Ulasim Asistani app, which helps travelers plan journeys across multiple forms of transport, leading to a considerable improvement in satisfaction ratings among its citizens.
The report uses five metrics - availability, affordability, efficiency, convenience, and safety and sustainability - with sub-indicators for each metric to benchmark the 25 cities. The full report is here.
Here is the ranking of cities based on public transport usage
The absence of US cities and the presence of Moscow is interesting. Moscow's rise should come as no surprise since it has invested heavily in improving transportation in recent years.
In sharp contrast, American cities dominate in ease of personal transport use.
The report has an interesting ranking citizen's perceptions of various aspects of urban transportation.
These perception rankings are important for public policy. Obviously the rankings will be different for developing country cities. It's likely that affordability, public transport efficiency, and road network would occupy the top slots, followed by those like physical safety and intermodality.
The report like most MGI reports is very informative. The sections on measures undertaken by some cities to keep urban mobility going during the pandemic, new projects, and the detailed profiles of the 25 cities are very useful. Unfortunate that New Delhi does not figure in the list. It would useful for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to just borrow the same indicators and do a benchmarking of the major Indian cities.
India and its cities have a lot of catching up to do in adopting urban transportation reforms. Public debates, citizen demand, and policies remain stuck on issues like adding roads, fly-overs, buses, and metro-railways. All these require large financial investments and there are hard fiscal limits. Even where we have gone beyond, it's been confined to digital technologies like ticketing and information sharing Apps. Instead, there is a large universe of non-financial behaviour change and regulatory interventions which have remained unexplored.
As I've written and blogged earlier (here too), apart from adequate infrastructure and good public transport systems, sustainable urban transportation require measures that discourage vehicle ownership and usage and encourage walking and shared transportation options (car pools and shared bikes). Measures like higher motor vehicle taxes, license plate auctions, congestion charges, electronic road pricing, limiting private vehicle lanes, dedicated bus lanes, making parking expensive, and car-pooling are hardly discussed. The idea of transit-oriented development while discussed often, is hardly implemented in its true spirit anywhere.
It's time for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, perhaps as part of the Smart Cities Mission, to prioritise urban transportation and incentivize cities for these hard reforms. How about indicator(s) which ranks cities on these measures and incentivise them with funding under Smart Cities Mission?
Critics and sceptics will argue that Indian cities, unlike the western ones, are still on the phase of growing their vehicle ownership and infrastructure, and also these measures are impossible without good public transport. But given the near-crisis nature of urban mobility problems across cities, this sequential thinking is not appropriate. Besides, there are several examples from other similarly placed cities elsewhere which have adopted these measures. Latin America is a very good example. We're already well past the time to introduce these measures.
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