Michael Replogle

Sustainable Transportation Strategies for Third World Development

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The World Bank and Global Motorization

Global lending institutions like the World Bank are but one actor on the stage of the global development process. Their staff is frequently swamped by demands to process more loans with fewer resources, juggling huge projects across the globe. While much of their work is reactive and is guided by the directions and capabilities of local elites in borrower country institutions, these global lending institutions still wield substantial influence over local elites and hold veto power over many projects. Policies and spending priorities expressed by organizations like the World Bank can over time significantly reshape the proposals coming forth from borrowers.

Transportation policy in most Third World countries is made by people who are affluent enough to own cars. It is dominated by engineers and economists usually trained in American-style policy solutions. Often it is influenced by individuals who profits from oil import deals, automobile dealerships, construction contracts, or other connections to motorization.

Within this environment, with too few exceptions, transportation policy makers either ignore or call for the destruction of the informal transportation sector in which low-income people meet their own mobility needs through human or animal powered transportation or by using privately or cooperatively owned small paratransit vehicles.

The leading global lending institutions are responsive to this agenda and frequently help reinforce these attitudes. The World Bank's recently updated urban transport policy statement (5) speaks appropriately of helping "developing countries find inexpensive ways of increasing transport capacity and improving transport flows, with particular attention to the transport needs of the urban poor." However, by viewing non-motorized transport solely as a congestion generator rather than as a part of the solution to urban mobility problems, the Bank policy fails to meet this objective.

Without a realistic understanding of the transportation system used by the poor, it is impossible to improve mobility for the poor. Transportation professionals need to remove their blinders and to drop their comfortable assumptions about what people can afford and what choices they prefer. The failure of planners to understand the transport needs of low income people and the implicit bias towards motorization was boldly demonstrated in a recent major World Bank report on transportation in China (12) in which the word "bicycle" was not found.

The recent World Bank Urban Transport Policy Report indeed ignores extensive recommendations published in other recent World Bank studies that call for a reorientation to favor such low-cost transportation to meet basic needs (13,14), as well as the similar recommendations of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements (7).

The attitudes of international development organizations carry over into the policies adopted by many local elites and Third World governments and are often reinforced by generous financial incentives offered to local elite groups. The allocation of funds by the sources of development capital to different modes of transport help shape the pattern of local transportation infrastructure priorities.

Current World Bank lending for 18 road projects is US $1 billion. The major share of $100 million in annual World Bank spending for urban transport is related to automobile transportation promotion. Between 1972 and 1985, the World Bank spent more than half a billion dollars on urban road construction, improvement and maintenance, with about $120 million devoted to urban traffic management and road safety. Of the $2.1 billion spent by the World Bank in 1985 on transportation, miniscule amounts were expended to benefit the non-motorized informal transportation sector.

The long-term effect of World Bank programs has been to encourage more capital and energy intensive transport systems and metropolitan forms to the great disadvantage of the poor, who cannot afford the higher cost transport systems (4). In Pakistan, for instance, the World Bank is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a local automobile industry, which the elite covets as a sign of high status "modernism," regardless of appropriateness or sustainability.

Little investment has gone into research and development of those modes that are of greatest use to the poor. As an Indian development professional notes (15),

Our research programs do not have even a remote relationship with the problems of poor people and rural areas of India. We consider research on aeroplanes, aerospace, and automobiles as the real science, whereas research on Indian modes of transport like bullock carts, horse carts, and rickshaws is considered substandard and below dignity...The transport problems of the bulk of people in this country can be solved by working on these indigenous vehicles and not by working on airplanes, rockets and automobiles.

For urban areas in developing countries, the World Bank and many others advocate better transportation system management, including restrictions on urban automobile use, and more investment in motorized public transportation services. However, the vast majority of World Bank transportation funding is not spent on either TSM or public transportation, as the figures above show, but rather to fund road construction and the development of motorized transportation industries (5).

TSM offers many excellent ideas for more cost-effective and environmentally-sound transportation and buses offer a sound means for low cost public transport in most circumstances (16). However, the effectiveness of many TSM strategies has been limited by political resistance to serious urban automobile restraints. In most cities, shortages of financing have kept the growth rate of public transportation services below population growth rates, leading to very low service quality.

In many developing countries, TSM has been used to reduce the availability of low cost transport, forcing people to walk, to use already overcrowded public transport or to defer travel. This has been encouraged by policies of the World Bank, which have been generally hostile to human-powered transportation modes. In the World Bank's Urban Transport Policy Report (5), the sole use of the word "bicycle" is in a statement noting that, "congestion is often exacerbated when the road network must cope with a mixture of motorized vehicles, other modes of transport (such as bicycles and pedal carts), and pedestrians."

Following the inference of such statements, many cities have imposed constraints on non-motorized modes of travel, such as cycle rickshaws, bicycles, and pedestrians, claiming these "cause congestion." This is despite the fact that bikeways offer capacities far higher than typical automobile freeways and close to the capacities of buses in mixed traffic (7).

Following the ideology of motorization, transportation policy makers in a number of developing countries have destroyed valuable non-motorized transportation resources. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Jakarta, Indonesia, over 75,000 cycle rickshaws have reportedly been thrown into the sea in the past several years, ostensibly to reduce traffic congestion. The government of Dacca, Bangladesh, in April 1987 announced plans to completely ban pedicabs from the city on safety grounds, although they employ more than 100,000 people (17).

An ongoing World Bank project will likely be proposing measures to significantly reduce the attractiveness of bicycle use in China. Western consultants and Bank staff, with their professional orientation towards modernization and motorized transportation "solutions," reinforce those Chinese professionals who seek to emulate the modern motorized transport systems of the West. Rather than identifying means for better integrating land use controls, traffic management systems, and the current bicycle-based transport system, with augmentation by more and better public transportation, these professionals call for "bicycle traffic to be strictly controlled with the ultimate intent of reducing it to an auxiliary means of short-range transportation." (3)

The following quote from a recent paper (3) by a Chinese transportation planner on the "bicycle problem" in China illustrates this thinking:

As has been shown in the developed countries, the traffic role of bicycles will gradually phase out when urban transportation becomes modernized...Their functions there have already been reduced to being tools of sports, recreation and tourism. Such examples should serve as our reference in the planning of our future urban development. Currently efforts should be focused on speeding up road construction, improving public transportation and traffic control and restraining volume of bicycle traffic in the cities, so as to prevent further worsening of urban traffic congestion...Steps should be taken now to restrict overproduction of bicycles...Control on urban bicycle traffic should be tightened by strictly restricting licensing and enforcing safety inspection of bicycles. Bicycles should not be allowed to travel on certain vital or busy urban streets, but be gradually diverted to specially-built bicycle lanes in different urban districts...A full-scale development of urban road, public transportation and traffic control systems should be carried out with the ultimate aim of completely modernizing the urban traffic system in the Chinese cities.

Safety and traffic congestion are cited as reasons why it is desirable to reduce the use of pedal-powered modes of transport. However, significant safety and traffic congestion problems are associated with both motorized and non-motorized transport modes.

With 50,000 deaths a year associated with the automobile in the U.S., there are no moves afoot to ban the automobile and, indeed, it is difficult to obtain more support for far safer public transport modal alternatives that could save many lives. The wholesale assault on trishaws and bicycles on safety grounds is simply an expression of the political power of automobile users and motorized public transport interests who resent sharing road space with slow non-motorized modes used by the poor. This situation has its structural parallel in the removal of the slums, favilas, squatter settlements, and the like by elites who wish to displace the poor to favor their own interests.

In the area of urban housing policies "slum clearance" has been largely discredited in the international development community and replaced by "sites and services" approaches to community development, recognizing that there are not enough resources available to provide every household in squatter settlements in the developing world with "adequate" housing.

Similar changes in thinking are needed in transport policy, recognizing that there are not enough resources available to provide every person in the world with motorized transport. The destruction of slow, low-cost transport modes destroys useful resources for mobility just as the destruction of "slums" destroys real housing. By eliminating those things deemed by the elite to be "eyesores" or "slow and inefficient" and generally of low status, the quality of life for the poor is diminished and human society is further impoverished.