Representatives from nearly two dozen Asian national governments, along with representatives of civil society and local government, on August 24th joined in adopting the Bangkok 2020 Declaration, committing to achieving ambitious, measurable goals for environmentally sustainable transportation over the coming decade. ITDP’s founder and global policy director, Michael Replogle, helped develop and negotiate the final agreement at the Fifth EST Forum for Asia, held in Bangkok, Thailand, 23-25 August, working with officials from the United Nations Centre for Regional Development. “This agreement will provide a valuable framework for measuring progress across the region in coming years,” said Replogle. For more information see the Press Release

Contact:  Michael Replogle, ITDP in Bangkok +1(301)529-0351 mreplogle@itdp.org
Stephanie Lotshaw, ITDP in New York +1(212)629-8001 slotshaw@itdp.org
Ko Sakamoto, TRL in London +44 (0) 7827 890804 ksakamoto@trl.co.uk

Experts Call For Urgent Transport Financing Changes ASAP

(Bangkok, Thailand August 23, 2010) At a meeting today of top transportation and environment leaders from two dozen governments across Asia, key experts said changes in how transport is financed are essential if cities and nations are to deal effectively with the rapid growth in motor vehicle traffic and related environmental and health problems, including climate change.

“Current transport financing practices are unfit to meet 21st century needs,” Michael Replogle, Global Policy Director and Founder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). “As much as $700 billion is spent annually subsidizing motor fuels, while hundreds of billions more in public and global aid funds subsidize the growing use of cars,” he said. “This comes at the expense of investments in more pressing human needs for modern bus rapid transit, streets safe for walking and cycling, quality public space, as well as health, housing, and education,” he said.

As documented in a report by the Transport Research Laboratory released today by ITDP and the Partnership for Sustainable Low Carbon Transport, over $1.5 trillion is spent annually on transport globally, mostly in ways that exacerbate rather than solve the problems associated with traffic growth, including congestion, health-harming air pollution, accidents, energy insecurity, and climate change. The report outlines financing changes that will enable developing nations to achieve more sustainable, affordable, and equitable approaches to transportation. “These steps can help others avoid costly mistakes made by the world’s most car-dependent cities, like Houston, which will face growing challenges in a carbon-constrained world,” said Replogle. “Other cities, from Copenhagen, Madrid, and Berlin, to Singapore, Guangzhou, and Bogota are demonstrating more effective paths to transport system modernization.”

“Incentives, financial support, and national support programs, as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, can enable cities to address transport challenges and spur sustainable development. Such programs can help move towards more integrated transport policies and planning that is less biased in favor of motor vehicle travel,” said James Leather of the Asian Development Bank.

“This report shows domestic public finance, official development assistance, and private investment flows now overwhelmingly favor rapid motorization. The modest growing resources contributed by global carbon finance programs must leverage shifts in these much larger transport financial flows if they are to be effective,” said Manfred Breithaupt of German Technical Cooperation/GTZ.

“Improved access for the transport sector to climate finance under the Clean Development Mechanism, the Global Environment Facility or newly established funds like the Climate Investment Fund can help the transport sector accelerate the replication and scaling up of sustainable, low carbon policies, programs and projects as well as promote transfer of low carbon transport services and technology,” said Heather Allen of the International Union of Public Transport Authorities (UITP). “This makes it also important to ensure that transport is included in a new climate agreement to be reached in the UNFCCC conferences in Cancun 2010 or Johannesburg 2011, enabling international support to developing countries undertaking Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions,” she said.

The report, A Paradigm Shift Towards Sustainable Low Carbon Transport: Financing the Vision ASAP, outlines key steps in financing reform: to Analyze impacts, Shift existing resources towards a sustainable direction, Add funding where resources are still lacking, and restructure pricing incentives so users Pay for the full costs of transport consumption, identifying measures to be taken by public, private, and international organizations. The report authors, Ko Sakamoto, Holger Dalkman, and Derek Palmer, of the Transport Research Laboratory, are noted global experts in transport and environmental policy.

The report will be released at the Fifth Regional EST Forum in Asia, which seeks to adopt sustainable transport goals for the coming decade, at a plenary session at 10:30 am to noon. Experts will be available for questions immediately after the session in the Riverside VII room at the Royal Orchard Sheraton Hotel, Bangkok, the venue for the Fifth Regional EST Forum in Asia.

The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy is a leading international non-profit organization founded in 1985 that promotes environmentally sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide. See http://www.itdp.org.

The Partnership for Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport is a voluntary, multi-stakeholder partnership of over 50 organizations registered with the Commission on Sustainable Development and which have agreed to work together to advance sustainable, low carbon transport. Members include the Asian Development Bank, InterAmerican Development Bank, African Development Bank, German Technical Cooperation/GTZ, UITP, ITDP, International Energy Agency, The Energy and Resources Institute, Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities Center, UN Center for Regional Development, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN Environment Programme, Korean Transport Institute, Japanese Ministry of Land Infrastructure Transport and Tourism, Ahmedabad Centre for Environment Planning & Technology, Institute for Transport Policy Studies, Philippines National Center for Transportation Studies, and Rockefeller Foundation. See http://www.slocat.net.

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http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1289850

The Buenos Aires city government recently initiated a bike-to-work program, its latest effort to get residents on bikes and out of their cars. With a presentation from ITDP, the government held a conference with business leaders to outline various means of encouraging their employees to commute by bicycle, as well as the accompanying advantages for the companies, employees, and environment. Shortly after, a number of companies, including Coca-Cola, and Telefónica, signed an agreement with the city in which they commit to encouraging sustainable mobility among their employees. At the end of 2010, ITDP will assess the companies who signed the agreement and will honor those which have made the most progress towards promoting sustainable transportation among their employees.

In a recent article about the bike-to-work program in La Nación newspaper, ITDP Argentina Country Director Andrés Fingeret was quoted saying “the use of the bicycle is a global trend whose success can be seen in cities around the world such as Mexico City, New York, and Bogotá. The bike allows for a more reasonable use of public space because it is much smaller than a car, and it is much more affordable.”

Other aspects of the city’s bicycle program include the construction of 100 kilometers (62 miles) of protected bicycle lanes, the installation of 1,000 bike parking racks around the city, and the passage of a new law stating that commercial parking garages must accept bicycles and cannot charge more than 10% of their fee for cars.

Full article in La Nación (in Spanish):

Cyclists in Hangzhou, China. Photo: ITDP

Visionary urbanist Jan Gehl and Walter Hook, Executive Director of the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), have together set out ten keys to creating more sustainable cities in a new publication.

“Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life” shows how cities from New York to Nairobi can meet the challenges of rapid population growth and climate change while improving their competitiveness. The publication’s purpose is to reframe the issue of transport so that it is no longer seen as separate from, but rather integral to, urban design.

Download the publication here.

“Cities of the twenty-first century should be lively cities, safe cities, sustainable cities and healthy cities,” said Jan Gehl. “All of these qualities can be achieved if we embrace these ten principles, which means putting people first.”

In a concise and accessible format, the booklet is a must read for all those involved in city design and urban planning, and forms the backbone of the ITDP exhibition “Our Cities Ourselves,” now on view at New York’s Center for Architecture.

What are the ten principles of sustainable transport?
1. Walk the walk: Create great pedestrian environments
2. Powered by people: Create a great environment for bicycles and other non-motorized vehicles
3. Get on the bus: Provide great, cost-effective public transport
4. Cruise control: Provide access for clean passenger vehicles at safe speeds and in significantly reduced numbers
5. Deliver the goods: Service the city in the cleanest and safest manner.
6. Mix it up: Mix people and activities, buildings and spaces.
7. Fill it in: Build dense, people and transit oriented urban districts that are desirable.
8. Get real: Preserve and enhance the local, natural, cultural, social and historical assets.
9. Connect the blocks: Make walking trips more direct, interesting and productive with small-size, permeable buildings and blocks.
10. Make it last: Build for the long term. Sustainable cities bridge generations. They are memorable, malleable, built from quality materials, and well maintained.

Cities face massive population growth, particularly in the developing world. By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population, or 5 billion people, will live in cities. The transportation sector currently accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, a growing proportion derived largely from cars and trucks. (Source: International Transport Forum, http://www.internationaltransportforum.org/Pub/pdf/10GHGTrends.pdf)

Some cities are waking up to this reality, and changing direction. “Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life” showcases examples of cities reaping the benefits of integrating urban planning and design that gives priority to pedestrians and transit. It is a guide for cities and countries that want to make their cities more competitive and livable, while helping to solve the problem of climate change. 

For a limited edition hard copy of Our Cities Ourselves: 10 Principles for Transport in Urban Life, email mobility@itdp.org. Download the electronic version as a PDF.

Reporter Saquib Rahim asks, “As the world hurtles toward 2 billion cars, an increasingly important issue for the climate will be this: How will China’s citizens get to work?”

Noting that “China has also become the world’s fastest-growing market for high-speed city buses,” Rahim also says that, “the simplicity of building BRT means a system can be up and running in less than five years, compared to train systems that can take a decade or more.”

Read the full article on the Guangzhou BRT here.

The report breaks new ground by identifying various ways to measure how much transport infrastructure projects contribute to climate change as a function of the nature and cost of the projects and the amount of mobility provided for passengers and freight. The report shows that local pollution reduction and CO2 reduction are correlated. Three-fourths of ADB’s transport sector investments in the past decade have been in building expressways and the report finds these substantially increase CO2 emissions. The report shows how redirecting a portion of such investments to lower-carbon sustainable transport projects could have significantly cut CO2 emissions.  For example, if ADB’s investment in expressways had been cut by half in the past decade and the funds instead invested in 6,863 km of road rehabilitation, 824 km of BRT, and 32,942 km of bikeways, it would have cut ADB’s transportation sector carbon footprint by 25%, to 591 million tons.

The ADB report provides new analytic tools for carbon emissions intensity measurement, suggests ways to improve project designs to cut CO2, and offers suggestions for including carbon emissions monitoring into ADB’s project reporting process. The new sketch analysis tools for CO2 evaluation are designed to evaluate various road, public transport, and non-motorized transport initiatives, with sensitivity to induced demand, network saturation, and variations in motor vehicle fleet composition. These have been recently published for public comment by ADB here. These ADB-supported tools are being further developed and adapted by ITDP and CAI-Asia for proposed use by the Global Environmental Facility.

Our Cities Ourselves opens Thursday, June 24 at AIA Center for Architecture in New York. The exhibition asks architects from ten cities – New York, Rio de Janeiro, Ahmedabad, Budapest, Dar es Salaam, Ghangzhou, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Johannesburg, and Mexico City, to re-envision how those cities could look in 2030, with design that would drastically discourage private car use. “We simply can’t sustain the sort of automobile-dominated transportation systems that we have today,” says Walter Hook, ITDP’s Executive Director.

Read the full story here: http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/features/2010/jun/12/urban-planning-brooklyn-bridge-michael-sorkin/

Download the testimony here.

Join the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy
in celebrating its 25th anniversary and the opening of
Our Cities Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy has launched Our Cities Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life, a cutting-edge campaign that puts forward a new urban future designed around sustainability, equity, and livability.

Our Cities Ourselves kicks off in New York City with an exhibition exploring the many ways that sound transportation planning can be a solution to climate change, while also improving the quality of life for rapidly growing urban populations.

Click here to register and purchase tickets.

When:  Wednesday, June 30, 2010
6:30 – 9:30 p.m.

Doors open at 6:00 p.m.

Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres

Where: Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place

New York City

Read more about Our Cities Ourselves here.