Accessibility within cities has not gotten better despite the best efforts of urban planners. Creative solutions are needed to create better connected and focused cities, write Sarah Kollenbrander and Katarina Hecht.
Sarah Kollenbrander is Head of Global Programs at the Alliance for Urban Transformations. Katarina Hecht is a Political Fellow at LSE Cities.
Over the past 50 years, transportation planners have focused on reducing congestion to improve the movement of people within cities. But increasing road capacity, vehicle speeds and parking spaces has not solved the urban traffic problem. Building more roads and parking lots attracts more cars and locks cities into expensive, unsustainable sprawl.
Today, transportation planners realize that they need to work more closely with other sectors to improve accessibility within cities. Cities such as Singapore, Bogotá, Stockholm, Vienna, Hong Kong, and San Francisco offer a high quality of life built around vibrant, walkable neighborhoods connected by efficient, high-capacity public transportation.
In these compact and connected cities, people can live, work, study, shop and have fun without the need for excessive travel. They also tend to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, so compact, connected cities can also help tackle climate change.
City governments have led the way in creating more compact and connected cities, building on success and learning from each other. Since Curitiba, Brazil, piloted its first bus rapid transit system, 170 other cities around the world have built their own. Since Paris in France and Amsterdam in the Netherlands first introduced bike-sharing schemes, more than 500 cities have emulated them.
But city governments cannot improve urban accessibility alone. They need supportive policies at all levels of government to encourage mixed-use development, discourage the use of private cars, promote the use of public transportation, and make it easier to walk or bike. National governments play a particularly crucial role when it comes to reforming policies and management systems to nurture compact and connected cities.
New research presents the results of a survey of 77 transportation experts from 26 countries. Transport experts were asked to identify key policies that national governments could deploy to promote more compact and connected cities. Their top five recommendations are:
1. Reallocate your transportation budgets
Most national governments continue to spend more on building and maintaining roads than they do on mass transit, bike lanes, or sidewalks. Roads are important: they are able to connect sparsely populated areas, and they can support buses and bicycles as well as cars.
But national governments can shift their spending away from roads toward infrastructure that primarily favors public transportation, walking and cycling. For example, Colombia has reallocated the national transport budget and supported city governments to do the same: the result has been the success of Bogotá’s bus rapid transit system and the impressive Medellin Metro, which transports nearly 300 million passengers each year.
The important lesson here is that supporting more compact and connected cities does not necessarily require larger transportation budgets, but rather a more strategic use of available resources.
2. Integrate your urban plans and transportation plans
Historically, national land use, housing and transport policies have been developed by separate ministries. This has led to residential areas in cities being poorly connected to jobs, schools, hospitals and parks, so people end up driving long distances every day.
Bringing experts and planners together across different ministries and levels of government makes it easier to develop more coherent and integrated plans. For example, the National Strategic Framework for Land Transport in South Africa provides local governments with a clear overarching framework to support integrated spatial and transport planning within urban areas.
An increasing number of national governments have asked cities to create integrated urban mobility plans, including major emitters such as Brazil.
3. Submit road pricing
Charging drivers to use the road could help reduce congestion, distribute the social costs of driving more fairly, and improve air quality. The price could be set to more closely reflect the true cost: for example, heavier and more polluting vehicles could be charged a higher congestion charge.
Singapore pioneered road pricing in 1975, and has since been followed by London, Oslo, Milan, Stockholm and, most recently, New York. Many of these cities have strategically allocated their revenues to reinvest in public transportation, so that road pricing not only deters cars, but also helps make alternative modes of travel less expensive, more efficient, and more enjoyable.
As electric cars become more popular, road pricing will become less important in tackling air pollution and carbon emissions, and more important in tackling congestion.
4. Establishment of urban transportation authorities
Many people who live in cities commute from a much wider area: they travel from Bonn to work in Cologne, or from Pretoria to work in Johannesburg. It therefore makes sense for national governments to establish transport authorities with responsibility for multiple modes of transport across the metropolitan area.
These transport authorities must take sufficient responsibility for spatial planning, budgets and operations so that they can meaningfully shape transport systems – as TfL has done so well. The Government of India is now supporting local governments in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kochi to establish integrated transport authorities.
This strong mandate from the national government is essential, as poor coordination between different jurisdictions and service providers could undermine the effectiveness of the new authority.
5. Land value collection has been widely used
Public infrastructure projects can boost real estate values and create significant new job opportunities. Governments are seizing on this to generate revenue for these projects by taxing rising land prices, negotiating contributions from property owners, or strategically selling and leasing land around new transportation infrastructure.
Land value capture tools ensure that public funds are used for public benefits in cities from Harare in Zimbabwe to São Paulo in Brazil. Land value capture must be carefully designed to ensure that it does not reward sprawl and displacement, but has great potential.
Hong Kong, for example, has funded most of its impressive metro system through property taxes and the joint development of increasingly valuable land surrounding the metro stations.
