EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - Urban Transportation Policy: A Guide and Road Map

Urban Transportation Policy: A Guide and Road Map

Introduction

The main transportation issues facing cities today fall into familiar categories– congestion and public transit. But the emerging needs in each area are quite different than those most widely understood and commonly analyzed. According to Kenneth A. Small's paper 'Urban Transport Policy: A Guide and Road Map', policy makers can take great advantage of the shifting terrain on which urban transportation operates.

Description

For congestion, there is now a far richer menu of options that are understood, technically feasible, and perhaps politically feasible. This is accounted for by several factors:

Product differentiation: One can now contemplate offering roads of different qualities and prices, and allowing users to choose.
Privatization: Many selected road segments are now operated by the private sector.
Transportation officials are keenly interested due to financial constraints.
Attitudes toward pricing: Road pricing is routinely considered in planning exercises, and field experiments have made it more familiar to urban voters.
Goods movement: Urban trucking has grown in its environmental effects and links to theurban economic base, especially in port cities. One result is serious interest in tolled truck-only express highways.

For public transit, several similar factors call for changes in policy:

The dominance of large public transit agencies has led to an undesirable homogenization of service. There is a need for political mechanisms to allow each type of transit to specialize where it is strongest.
The spread of “bus rapid transit” has opened new possibilities for providing the advantages of rail transit at lower cost.
The prospect of pricing and privatizing highway facilities could reduce the amount of subsidy needed to maintain a healthy transit system.
Privately operated public transit is making a comeback in other parts of the world. Lessons there may offer pointers for the US.

The single most positive step toward better urban transportation would be to encourage the spread of road pricing. A second step, more speculative because it has not been researched, would be to use more environmentally-friendly road designs that provide needed capacity but at modest speeds, and that would not necessarily serve all vehicles.

Conclusions

Policy makers can take advantage of the shifting terrain on which urban transportation operates through a number of steps. Taking any of them will help. Taking all of them would inaugurate a revolutionary change that would greatly improve urban life.

Encourage highway pricing innovations.
Expand highway pricing to an entire corridor or area.
Seek better tradeoffs between efficiency and public appeal for pricing schemes.
Encourage private participation in highways with good franchise terms.
Pursue highway designs that emphasize high capacity at moderate speeds and with an
environmentally friendly footprint.
Encourage niche transit.
Break up large metro-wide transit providers by spinning off those serving lower-density
areas.
Configure federal capital-grant programs to encourage bus rapid transit.
Use open-ended user-side subsidies to improve incentives for public providers to control
costs.

Contact info

University of California at Irvine - Department of Economics
3151 Social Science Plaza - Building B, Room 2203
92697-5100 Irvine, CA
Kenneth A. Small (Research Professor & Professor Emeritus), tel. +1 (949) 824-5658

Publication date

/05/2007

Researcher

Kenneth A. Small

Links

Click here to visit the website of Professor Kenneth A. Small Click here to visit the European Commission's website on transport

Download the full article "Urban Transportation Policy: A Guide and Road Map" (PDF, Eng, 258 kB)

Document type

research

Themes

Urban Policy

Keywords

Transport and infrastructure