Urban planning and technology can change commuter ways

It would be tempting to view the construction in the past few years of a pair of elevated metro tracks next to Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road as a reverse for the motor car. The opening of Dubai’s metro system in September this year marked the first rail-based public transport system in the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, where rapid increases in wealth, cheap fuel and sprawling cities have produced high levels of car ownership and use. If upsurges in public transport use and walking and cycling elsewhere in the world in recent years are taken into account, the development might seem like part of a global shift towards more environmentally friendly transport modes.

Yet, in most cities of the world, car use continues to grow, no matter how good the alternatives. Shifts to cleaner modes of transport seem merely to free up road space for new motorists or for the existing ones to drive more.

The key question for urban transport is whether public policy should accept the dominance of cars and make them cleaner or make efforts to shift commuters to other forms of transport.

David Begg, a transport economist and former chairman of the UK government’s Commission for Integrated Transport, says shifts of journeys between modes can produce big reductions in carbon emissions. But they are not easy. “To achieve modal shifts, you need vision, determination and political will,” he says.

Alan Pisarski, author of the Commuting in America series of studies, believes cleaner cars are the most likely route towards long-term cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. He points out that even at the peak of US fuel prices in 2008 – when prices reached $4 a gallon, having been $1.50 as recently as 2002 – road traffic fell only 3.7 per cent year-on-year.

“If we’re going to have improvements in greenhouse gases – and I think we will – it will come much more from technological change – improvements in fuels, improvements in vehicles – than it will from people changing behaviour.”

At the heart of most countries’ debate over cleaning up urban transport is the taxation of car use. Most developed countries tax cars and fuel heavily. The proceeds meet the costs of road building and maintenance and make some contribution towards the costs of road transport such as pollution, congestion and accidents. In many countries, motorists believe such taxation is already excessive and politicians remain reluctant to confront such a powerful lobby group.

Consequently, relatively few have been willing to try charging to enter their cities at congested times – as happens in London, Singapore, Stockholm, Oslo and a few other cities. Professor Begg, a member of the board of Transport for London, the London mayor’s transport organisation, when the city’s congestion charge was introduced in 2003, points out that even excellent public transport has not been as successful at persuading motorists out of their cars as the congestion charge.

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