Michael Replogle

Sustainable Transportation Strategies for Third World Development

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Modal Diversity and Third World Transportation

There are a large number of different transportation modes in use around the world today, meeting in various ways and with varying success the mobility needs of human communities. Transportation engineers, planners, and policy makers, however, tend to focus most of their attention to the higher-cost motorized transportation modes-- automobiles, trucks, buses, railways, large ships and airplanes--when studying ransportation systems, identifying policy options, and offering investment plans.

Traditional, non-motorized and low-cost transportation modes--such as bicycles, carts, trishaws, small locally produced boats, and ox-carts--generally are ignored or dismissed without study as backward and inefficient. Little data are collected about these modes, reinforcing the impression among many transportation professionals that these modes are of little consequence. The most basic mode, walking, is similarly neglected as an area for serious inquiry and planning in most transportation planning efforts.

However, the majority of all trips made in the world are made by foot. In developing countries, most people rely on non-motorized transportation, occasionally or regularly supplemented by public transportation, often provided by the informal sector of the economy. Very wide variations in the level of walking, bicycling, and other informal transport sector activity can be observed between urban and rural regions and between different countries.

Walking accounts for two-thirds of total trips in large African cities such as Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam. Walking and cycling account for 60% of total trips and 40% of work related trips in Karachi. In Madras, one-third of vehicles entering the Central Business District are bicycles as are 25% of vehicles passing a cordon line 10-miles out from the center. On the other hand, in Kingston, Jamaica, 16% of work trips are by foot and less than 1% by bicycle. In relatively prosperous Malaysia, a recent study found that 70% of all on-farm trips and 501 of shopping trips are made on foot (1).

A survey of one district in India found that nearly 40% of rural households spend no money on travel or transport, being totally dependent on walking (1). In Kenya, surveys have found that more than 90% of rural trips were on foot, 4% by bicycle, 2% by paratransit, and only 0.5% by bus (2).

In many parts of Asia, the bicycle is a predominant means of short distance vehicular transport. In China, there are over 160 million bicycles and the urban bicycle ownership rate is about 0.5 per person and growing. In most Chinese cities, 50% to 90% of vehicular-passenger movements are by bicycle, with most of the remainder by bus (3).

In India, there are some 30 million bicycles, approximately 25 times as many per capita as there are motor vehicles (4). Pedal-powered trishaws constitute a predominant element in the street traffic of cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh, and account for a large percentage of all goods movements. In Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, and many other countries in this region, bicycles and tricycles have attained similar importance.

In many parts of the Western Hemisphere and Africa, however, bicycles and tricycles are far less commonplace. Opportunities for the transfer of bicycle and tricycle technologies between Asia and these regions appear to be great. Different transport development and planning strategies are called for in these different contexts.

A wide variety of motorized public transportation services operated by both the private and public sectors are found throughout developing countries. The vehicles employed include motorized trishaws built on extended motorcycle frames, small trucks, buses, and vans, larger buses and trucks outfitted for passenger hauling, and many types of rail vehicles.

Motorized public transportation in developing countries has been the subject of much research and discussion by transportation professionals. It has a very important role to play in moving people around urban and rural areas with only modest impact on the environment and demands on scarce energy and capital resources. However, even if public transportation is relatively inexpensive and efficient, many people still cannot afford it in many societies and will seek alternative means to move themselves or their goods. In many countries, public transport services have failed to keep up with population growth, widening the gap between transport system supply and demand.

The World Bank's Urban Transport Policy Report (5) estimates 600 million trips a day were being made by buses in third world cities in 1980. No similar estimates have been made for non-motorized modes, but it is likely that the volume of bicycle trips made daily in developing countries matches this value and that daily pedestrian trips are an order of magnitude greater.

Around the world, people dream of owning automobiles and covet the speed, privacy, comfort, and convenience of this mode of transport. It is not surprising that economic elites everywhere seek access to automobiles for themselves and their societies whenever it appears possible to attain this goal.

Achieving an automotive society, however, is well beyond the means of most of the world, at least for the foreseeable future. There simply is not enough petroleum, capital and infrastructure around for this to be a near-term global goal. Motorization is a pleasure attainable only by a small minority of the world's people.

Automobile ownership levels remain very low in much of the world. Out of every thousand people, less than 5 are car owners in Haiti, Pakistan, India and Indonesia, less than 7 in Bolivia, Zaire, and Honduras, and less than 14 in Liberia and Thailand. In Brazil and Mexico 60 out of a thousand own cars, compared to 300 in Europe and 500 in the United States (6). With the high costs of automobile ownership, obviously only the affluent drive cars in most developing countries.

The variations in the level of motorized and non-motorized transportation in different societies are a function of many forces, including investment, subsidy, and tax policies, infrastructure design and planning, regulatory actions, land use patterns that evolve in response to long-term transportation system evolution, topography, climate, cultural tendencies and habits, income levels and distributions, and other conditions.

A large share of these forces are controlled by technocrats and social elites who direct government policy and planning and who guide investment policies. The transportation technologies and choices available within a society are strongly shaped and limited by the long-term choices these groups make. End-user market forces can influence transport system evolution only within the narrow range of pre-selected and pre-conditioned choices that is offered.

In all but a handful of countries, virtually all transportation infrastructure investments and transportation subsidies are made to benefit the formal transport sector of motor cars, trucks, aviation, railways, and motorbuses. Changes in the producer surplus and military security interests remain the prime criteria for transportation investments in most developing countries, ignoring socio-economic effects.

Local short-distance mobility by non-motorized means becomes more difficult as infrastructure for long-distance, heavy motorized transportation alters the spatial distribution of settlements and as fast traffic displaces slower modes from rights-of-way.

Modally imbalanced transport investments and policies have led to a serious quantitative and qualitative mismatch between the mobility needs of the majority of the population and the transportation technologies that are supplied in both rural and urban areas of many developing countries.

In most cities in developing countries the number of people affected by inadequate facilities for pedestrians and bicycles and by slow and overcrowded public transportation vastly exceeds the number affected by traffic congestion and parking problems.

In rural areas of many developing countries, appropriate vehicles and transport services are not available to or affordable by most households. Current transport policies focused solely on modern, industrialized, higher-cost motorized modes are failing to meet mobility needs while generating widespread environmental problems and increasing spending of scare foreign currency reserves on petroleum, with serious economic effects (7). Countries like Haiti and El Salvador spend one-third of their import budget on fuel and transportation equipment (8).

As a United Nations study notes, the rural poor are "locked into a vicious circle involving lack of money, inadequate equipment, time-consuming and health-impairing methods of transport, lack of production flexibility and exploitation by transporters and middlemen. Inadequate transportation in rural areas...hampers productivity, limits access to services such as education and health services, and isolates much of the population from political and social life." (7)

The distributional impacts of transport system investments continue to be ignored at a huge social and human cost. Even when transport investments are made with an intent to help alleviate poverty, those who are better off in the first place are far better able to capture the benefits of these investments, since the poor often cannot afford to purchase or use available vehicles. The net effect of much current transportation investment in developing countries is to increase social and economic stratification at the expense of the poor while boosting import requirements and foreign debt.

A recent study (9) on transportation policies in Latin America commenting on this situation observed that,

"Motorization is increasing very fast despite oil and debt crises, but it should become more and more evident that the dream of an automotive society can never be a democratic dream, and the disproportionate price of making the dream more democratic could cause a severe headache even for the growing middle class, when it wakes out of its motorized dreaming to face the bill. A transportation policy which is strongly biased in favor of motorization is thus an irrational strategy."

Reduction in the diversity of transportation modal options offered within societies often reduces economic efficiency by forcing movements of people or goods to conform to the few higher-cost modes offered rather than enabling these movements to be made by the most appropriate and affordable means. More people end up walking long distances, or waiting for buses that sometimes never come, or they abandon the idea of moving themselves or their goods to places that they might have been able to reach by an affordable but unavailable mode of transport.

Just as an ecological system is healthiest when it displays great diversity and differentiation, so too is a transportation system most healthy and robust when diverse modal options are available to those moving people or goods.

A transportation system dependent on only one or two modes of transport is far more susceptible to disruption and system failure than one in which numerous different modes are allowed to operate within an competitive market environment regulated to the extent necessary to ensure safety and fair allocation of street space and other infrastructure between the modes serving different market niches.