About the Book
By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. To thrive, they will need efficient and sustainable forms of transport, but to achieve this, the financial incentives guiding urban transport operation must change – and change rapidly.
Urban transport plays a critical role in determining the social, environmental and economic shape of cities. Improving Urban Access: New Approaches to Funding Transport Investment provide innovative ideas on how we might reorganize transport finance to ensure that it is suited to serving the social, environmental and economic principles that must guide future urban living. Continuing the work begun by its predecessor, Urban Access for the 21st Century, the authors assess the complexity of implementing new finance approaches and suggest ways to make positive and radical changes. Although the range of revenue raising options remain limited to users, indirect beneficiaries, and the general public, these can be recast to transform the way transport is paid for and therefore how its services are delivered.
New finance models only succeed when they are intrinsically linked to the economic, social, cultural and political forces that create urban life. Together these volumes provide a starting point for the deeper research and policy design needed to successfully create urban transport finance systems that can address the challenges that 21st century cities present.
Table of Contents:
1. Sustainability and Social Inclusion: The complexity of financing urban access –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth 2. A Field Guide to the Challenge of Financing Urban Access –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth 3. Shaping Rapidly Growing Chinese Cities: Lessons in the behavioural impacts of transport finance choices –Jinhua Zhao & David Block-Schachter 4. The Social Meaning of "Access"; Lessons in transport governance from cities in developed counties –Jago Dodson, Matthew Burke, Neil Sipe and Anthony Perl 5. Mobility and Access when Formal Markets Do Not Exist: Lessons from cities in developing countries –Julien Allaire, Pablo Salazar Ferro, Bernard Abeiku Arthur, and Jean-Claude Ziv 6. Lessons from Economics: Mechanisms for financing mobility –Kenneth Gwilliam 7. Value Capture: Why we may be disappointed –Lauren Fischer and Elliott Sclar 8. Why Can’t Urban Transport Behave Like Other Public Services? Explorations in public utility regulation –Andrea Rizvi 9. Measuring Access not Mobility: A technical challenge –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth 10. Practical Approaches to Measuring Access and Social Inclusion: Lessons from Lisbon –José Viegas, and Luís Martínez 11. Access and Social Complexity: Identifying and managing access requirements across social groups and across the world –Antonio Páez 12. What is Past is Prologue: Stepping into the future –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth
About the Author :
Elliott D. Sclar is professor of urban planning at Columbia University, USA, where he directs the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) at the Earth Institute. CSUD is a VREF Center of Excellence in Future Urban Transport. An economist, Sclar studies the financial dynamics of public services, especially public transport. His book You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The economics of privatization won two major academic prizes. He co-authored Access for All: Transportation and urban growth with K. H. Schaeffer.
Måns Lönnroth, trained in applied mathematics with a graduate degree from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, is interested in the meetings between politics, policy, and science. He has been a board member of the VREF and also managing director of Mistra, a Swedish endowed foundation for strategic environmental research, as well as international vice chairman of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. He has been a political advisor at the Swedish Prime Minister’s Office between 1985 and 1991, co-organizing the Swedish government’s commission on HIV/AIDS, and was a state secretary at the Swedish ministry of environment between 1994 and 1999.
Christian Wolmar is an author and journalist based in London, UK, specializing in transport. He is a frequent speaker at conferences both in Britain and abroad, and has written a series of books on railway history, including The Subterranean Railway (the London Underground), Fire and Steam (railways in Britain), Blood, Iron and Gold (the influence of railways across the world) and To the Edge of the World (the history of the Transsiberian railway).
Review :
"Improving Urban Access" provides a wide-ranging introduction to the issues of funding and financing urban transport, ranging from how we got into the current predicament to the prospects for a variety of solutions that might make transport more inclusive, efficiently funded, and soundly managed. The ideas discussed here should be deeply understood by everyone concerned with transport policy and planning." - David M. Levinson, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Richard P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation Engineering
"Improving Urban Access is a must-read for the 21st century generation of transport and urban planners. Lessons learned have called for a bold rethinking of planning and implementation of a highway-centered landscape. With an emphasis on access – where access addresses quality of life and place, old models of mobility give way to rethinking the institutions that serve our growing urban areas, the ways in which citizens can finance new transport modes and how – we can achieve a more equitable social structure." - Robert E. Paaswell, Distinguished Professor City University, City College of New York, former CEO of the Chicago Transit Authority
"Many public servants are so desperate to "find" additional revenues for urban transportation that they may lose sight of what they are trying to accomplish and why. This book does an excellent job of reminding us that how something is funded directly impacts the societal outcomes we are wishing to achieve, pointing out that careful consideration of funding mechanisms is absolutely critical to success." - Joshua Schank, Chief Innovation Officer, Los Angeles County Metro, former President of the Eno Center for Transportation
"Transportation policy scholarship is changing slowly but dramatically, and this second stimulating milestone book by these editors charts that transition. Contributors forcefully address the most important unresolved questions as transportation thinking moves from forecasting demand and providing facilities to a new emphasis on access, social and economic equity, and environmental sustainability." - Martin Wachs, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Urban Planning and Civil Engineering University of California Los Angles and University of California, Berkeley
