Moving people Moving people Sustainable transport development peter cox Zed Books london & new york UCT Press cape town Moving People: Sustainable Transport Development was first published in 2010 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Published in South Africa by UCT Press, 1st Floor, Sunclare Building, 21 Dreyer Street, Claremont, 7708, South Africa www.uctpress.co.za Copyright © Peter Cox 2010 The right of Peter Cox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Monotype Janson by illuminati, Grosmont Index by John Barker Cover designed by Rogue Four Design Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Antony Rowe, Cert no. SGS-COC-2953 Chippenham and Eastbourne Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, llc, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 84813 002 9 (Zed hb) isbn 978 1 84813 003 6 (Zed pb) isbn 978 1 84813 454 6 (Zed eb) isbn 978 1 91989 541 3 (UCT Press) Contents Tables and boxes vii Preface and acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 | Movement and mobility 7 2 | Sustainable development and ecomobility 17 3 | The problem of car-dominance 31 4 | Automobility and its alternatives 49 5 | The city as a system: transport as network 67 6 | Mobility in the megacity: Delhi 95 7 | Non-motorised transport: walking and cycling 117 8 | Bicycle and NMT programmes in action 131 9 | Bicycles and rickshaws in South Asia 165 10 | Institutional changes 189 Conclusion 213 References 220 Index 248 Tables and boxes table 1.1 Strengths and weaknesses of different modes of transport 12 box 1.1 Walking, transit and automobile cities 14 box 2.1 Sustainable development in practice 22 box 2.2 A green approach to sustainable urban transport 27 box 2.3 What is ecomobility? 30 table 3.1 Health effects of vehicular combustion products 33 table 3.2 Euro diesel emissions standards for vehicles of more than 1305 kg 35 table 3.3 Euro diesel emissions standards for buses and lorries 36 table 3.4 Lifecycle effects of oil recovery and use by stage 38 box 3.1 Comparative CO2 emissions 45 table 3.5 Relative greenhouse gas emissions of selected transport 46 table 3.6 Average distance per trip in UK 47 box 5.1 Four types of city and their transport systems 72 box 5.2 What is BRT? 82 table 5.1 Transport modal share in Bogotá 91 table 6.1 Vehicle numbers in Delhi 98 viii | moving people box 6.1 Travel patterns in an informal settlement in Delhi 100 box 6.2 People’s Charter on Clean Air 104 box 6.3 Transport for whom? 109 box 6.4 A master plan for Delhi 113 box 6.5 GEF/World Bank/UNDP Transport Project India 114 box 7.1 Bicycles: reducing travel costs, increasing mobility 123 table 8.1 Relative perfomance of various NMT and IMT modes 134 box 8.1 The Jinja Declaration 136 box 8.2 The Bicycling Empowerment Network 146 box 8.3 Declaration of African ministers on transport and the Millennium Development Goals 155 box 8.4 Vélo Mondial Cape Town Declaration 158 box 8.5 Report of the International Non-Motorized Transport and Intermediate Means of Transport Conference 162 box 9.1 Recommendations to safeguard the contribution of rickshaws to sustainable transport in Delhi 172 box 9.2 On your bike, Mr President, Uganda’s health demands it 179 box 10.1 Cities on the move 193 Preface and acknowledgements Several events have been crucial to the genesis of this book. The first meeting of the Cycling and Society Research Group made me realise that the tentative connections that I was making between the academic analyses of the social sciences and Development Studies and my own personal activities and advocacy were not a strange anomaly but a legitimate concern. Thinking and acting on the issues of sustainable transport and ecomobility have brought me into contact with a number of people from very different backgrounds and disciplines, both professional and academic. It is in the nature of the study of something as mundane as everyday mobility that it cannot be contained within straightforward academic disciplinary boundaries. Issues are raised which may be more specifically pertinent to individual disciplines of sociology, geography, planning, engineering, anthropology, design, architecture, politics and aesthetics. Gratitude must be expressed to numerous people whose conversations have helped me negotiate unfamiliar territories and helped orient me within the languages of various disciplines. It has been my privilege over the years to be involved with transport activists in a number of locations who have made me feel welcome. More recently the opportunity of gatherings such as the Velo-City and Vélo Mondial conferences have provided a x | moving people shared space where transport activists, policymakers, lobbyists and politicians get to air ideas, sometimes to confront their enemies, and to have their presuppositions and prejudices challenged. These contacts led to the initial idea for this book, and it is to them that it is indebted. Principal among those who have contributed ideas, participated in conversations, and whose actions have resulted in this work are Andrew Wheeldon of BEN and Giselle Xavier of SustranLac. Acknowledgements and thanks must also go all those involved in the Cycling and Society Research Group, especially Dave Horton, and to my colleagues at the University of Chester. The editors at Zed Books have been immensely helpful in encouraging me to write and have shown immense patience with my efforts. Finally, and above all, thanks to Barbara for her constant encouragement and support; it is to her that I dedicate this book. Introduction Transport is rapidly becoming one of the most problematic areas for sustainability. The current trends for personal mobility are shaped by the dominant practices of the industrialised nations: the private car as both symbol and tool of the freedom of the modern world. Indeed, in Fordism, part of the very process of twentieth-century industrialisation is defined by the rise of the motor industry, its practices and achievements. However, the demands of sustainability in relation to people’s everyday transport require a radical restructuring of our practices of mobility. The current dominance of automobility as the default mode of transport cannot be sustained in either environmental or social terms (see e.g. Newman and Kenworthy 1999; Vuchic 1999; Vasconcellos 2001; Whitelegg and Haq 2003; Banister 2005). The costs are destruc- tive. Climate change, the destabilising effects of global geopolitics skewed by the demands of oil extraction, localised air pollution, congestion, noise, the severance of communities, the anti-sociality inherent in automobility are simply fragments of the complex and systematic problems of overreliance on the private car. ‘Transport differs from other problems because it gets worse rather than better with economic development’ (Peñalosa 2005). The words of the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, provide both the rationale for this book and the starting point for its arguments. 2 | moving people Examining how people move around on an everyday, mundane basis it is clear that there are immense problems wherever we look. Whilst large numbers of people suffer from an inability to access basic services, lacking adequate or affordable transport to reach health care, markets, and access to similar opportunities, equally vast numbers who do have access to means of transport spend their travel time stationary, sitting in congested cities, while around them the air quality is degraded, streets become unsafe, and the transport sector provides an ever-increasing share of emissions contributing to human-induced climate change. These problems do not relate to the degree of development or wealth of cities; they are to be found in different forms across the globe. Tackling transport issues, however, is a task fraught with difficul- ties. The problem does not fit any neat categorisation. The patterns of, and needs for, human movement, even within a single urban area, are shaped by the layout and size of a city: its topography and geog- raphy, the presence of rivers and mountains; the existing transport infrastructure (roads, tram and rail lines, canals, pavements and cycleways); the distribution of housing and employment centres; its age (whether it was laid out before or after the advent of mechanised transport); its employment history and its current levels of economic wealth; and by broader relationships to its hinterland and neigh- bouring urban areas. In addition to these relatively fixed attributes, there are issues of governance: who owns transport routes and who regulates and finances them? Perhaps even more important are the people themselves: who are they, what are they travelling for, how are their travel needs created? What histories of movement do they grow up with to shape their expectations? What levels of inequality and forms of stratification exist to shape different groups’ experience of the city, and their relative access to places of employment, leisure, education, health care, housing and all the other social activities that tie them to families and friends? Producing answers to these and many other questions that under- lie the problems encountered in dealing with transport demands an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on resources in the social and physical sciences.