Transportation I

This time we had a lecture by Dr Khan Rahaman via webcam. That he could be halfway around the world while giving us a lecture only goes to show what technology is capable of in this day and age.

First he talked about what urban transportation planning is, then gave us some basic facts of urban mobility, then something about the challenges involved and asked if we need to make the planning sustainable. After this the different aspects involved in sustainable urban transportation planning.

Personally I felt the red thread through all the challenges was the government. The five pillars were environmental, social, economic and finance, governance and technology. The government has the power to affect all of these areas either through finance (carrot) or law and penalties (stick).

There are a lot of researcher currently occupied with the problems concerning the transportation itself and the socioeconomic issues therein lays but are anyone looking into how to get the government onboard? I mean, even a perfectly laid plan will fail if there was no consideration as to the government “putting sticks in the spokes”. The reasons are multiple; corruption, fear, pressure from somewhere, lack of knowledge, greed or simply their own mind.

But on to the actual transportation. Making the transportation sustainable should start with the means of transportation. The means should be environmental-friendly and cost effective. Environmental friendly is easy enough to understand but what does cost effective mean? Usually it means the least cost per person per transported mile but what is included therein? How do you count in such things as comfort and safety during the transportation, how many times a day should the same route be offered and how far will people be willing to walk to and from the bus-stop, metro-station or similar gathering point? In the western world there has been several studies regarding this but how about the developing world? I would dare to venture a guess that they are happy with far less since that is still in many places more than what they have now.

Adding a few key-routes so that people would have access to work, school and hospital would dramatically improve their situation in the developing world. The transportation could be organized only a few times a day and that would already be sufficient to provide the poor with more than ample workplaces. Creating public transport does not mean that there has to be a lot of different routes travelled multiple times a day, sometimes all that is needed is for people to get to and from the place of work.

Basically “sustainable” means that it can go on for a long time. So in the sense of providing a possibility for work to the poorest in developing countries, sustainable transportation could be a bus going to the work place in the morning and home after work is done and paid for by the company. Sometimes it is better to do the improvements in small increments since that could be the only way to guarantee that the whole thing doesn’t collapse under its own weight, a small community has no chance to sustain a widespread collective transportation system without subsidies from the city/government.