Countries’ policies for sustainable transport have the right intentions, but are incomplete and selective
A cycling track in Malaysia (Photo courtesy: Shankar S/Flickr)
The Eighth Regional Environmentally Sustainable Transport forum held
at Colombo in November 2014 gave an interesting insight into policy
formulation, implementation and management of environmentally
sustainable transport systems.
Among significant discussions at the conference was the one at
BAQ-EST on the crisis of air pollution and global health burden that has
already reached alarming levels. All nations are already
revising their
vehicle emission norms. Euro VI norms, which are now in place, are so
stringent that there cannot be a Euro VII. The European Union is now
trying to reduce vehicular emissions through modal shift towards the use
of public transport, cycling and walking.
BAQ-EST also threw light on developing nations like India which see
two sides of this reality. On the one hand, our cities are still
developing with urbanisation of new areas. On the other hand is our
increasing capacity to spend which leads more and more people to buy
private cars.
At a session hosted by Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and
Environment, Director General Sunita Narain had explained, “Unlike
developed nations which have already developed their cities in a pattern
which encourages use of private vehicles and are now looking to reduce
vehicle dependency through car restraint measures, we have the
opportunity to choose the appropriate pattern of development which can
keep the dependence on personal motorised vehicles at its minimum.
Developing nations of the world now face the challenge of transforming
their pattern of development to encourage use of public transport,
cycling and walking.”
The Bali declaration had set the vision of “Three Zeros—Zero
Congestion, Zero Pollution, and Zero Accidents towards Next Generation
Transport Systems in Asia”. Bali vision highlighted the commitment of
member nations to encourage sustainable mobility options through policy,
planning, design, enforcement, operation, administration and awareness
measures.
While most nations are working towards policy formation, almost all
of them are facing problems in implementation and improvements on the
ground. As a first step, countries have started acknowledging that
policies need to encourage sustainable mobility options. In India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar, a lot of effort has gone into
preparing policies for introducing integrated land use and transport
planning through transit-oriented development, roadmaps for preparing
transportation plans, encouraging use of public transport, policies for
encouraging use of non-motorised transport and pedestrianisation. These
countries have also attempted to make policies for car restraint through
mechanisms of travel demand management. However, most of these
countries face common problems such as difficulties in working in
existing cities, lack of technical expertise, lack of general awareness,
inter-departmental and inter-project issues along with lack of funding
and need for reform in other policies.
When we analyse the reports of all these countries, we realise that
all their efforts are being carried out in isolation rather than working
on them in conjunction. They are concentrating on construction of only a
few infrastructure projects, rather than implementing the whole
strategic plan of environmentally sustainable transport.
In the current institutional setup in countries, policies for
promoting and adopting sustainable transport are already in place. It is
time that the intergovernmental forum for environmentally sustainable
transport in Asia now starts focusing on internal restructuring and
capacity building of its institutions. They must also start sharing
knowledge regarding capacity building of agencies and implementation of
projects with each other.
One of the main reasons for this disconnect between policy
formulation and implementation can be attributed to planning mechanisms
of member countries. If we look back into the history of these
countries, we see that almost all of these countries were initially
colonised by traders largely from Europe. Our planning systems, which
originated from our colonial past, are still grappling to adapt to the
changing needs. Back then, the ideas of planning and governance were
derived from an anarchist line of thought, which would require the
governmental agencies to implement the ideas of the decision makers and
hence, the implementation would largely depend on engineers. After
independence, the same government agencies now have to work towards
technical support for decision making, policy formulation, and then
implementation, while the work is still largely done by engineers and is
still implemented by identifying specific infrastructure projects. The
compartmentalisation of work has led to a disconnect between the intent
of the policy and the actual infrastructure work implemented.
To understand this better, let us take the example of road
retrofitting works. A planning approach would understand a road as a
complex environment made of physical entities embedded in the natural
environment, socio-cultural beliefs of citizens of the city and its
communities manifest in various spaces, memories of the people embedded
in various parts of the road, existing and future infrastructure needs
and surrounding buildings, uses and activities. This approach would try
to find out a set of solutions to balance all components, without
getting into engineering details of each component.
On the other hand, an engineering approach would try to break this
complex environment into simplified components. It would then take the
physical components and infrastructure requirements to prepare
construction manuals. It would leave the other aspects for the concerned
professionals to look into.
Both these approaches have benefits only when they complement each other, rather than competing with each other.
Various member countries of the intergovernmental forum are trying to
address problems through a planning approach. It requires a lot of
initiative towards public participation, stakeholder consultation,
sustainable planning, awareness building, educating, operation &
management and enforcement. When the same countries report on
implementation, they only consider engineering solutions as deliverables
and leave the rest to something that cannot be addressed. This gives a
clear indication of the disconnect between planning and implementation
which is guided by a simplified engineering approach.
To sum it up, the intergovernmental forum for environmentally
sustainable transport needs to now look at institutional restructuring
and capacity building of its associated governmental agencies to marry
both approaches and achieve transition towards environmentally
sustainable transport.
