urban development, sustainable cities and its

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KKU Engineering Journal Vol. 34 No .5 (499 - 516) September – October 2007

URBAN DEVELOPMENT, SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND ITS Günter Emberger1 1

Institute for Transport Planning and Traffic Engineering, University of Technology Vienna, Austria Gusshausstrasse 30/2, A-1040 Vienna, Austria Email: [email protected]

ABSTRACT In this paper the historical development of urban settlements is introduced. Subsequently the concept of sustainability and possible indicators to assess urban development against sustainability are presented. In the third section overall system behaviour of the transport/land use system regarding certain transport related policy instruments (road capacity and ITS-applications) is shown using the method of causal loop diagramming. Finally general indicators to describe human mobility behaviour are presented and related to the former chapters (urban development, sustainability and ITSapplications) and some conclusions are drawn. The paper as a whole should form a discussion base to review the applications of ITS-instruments in a more controversial way as they are discussed today.

Keywords : Urban development, Sustainability, ITS

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URBAN DEVELOPMENT Firstly we have to look on the historical development of cities to understand why this densification in population has emerged. Settlements and cities came into being because they enabled the distribution of work and specialization of activities. The first cities or city-like agglomerations can be found in Mesopotamia and Turkey some 5000 years before Christ. The size and shape of these settlements in this time depended heavily on the available transport system, which was till 200 years ago solely based on solar energy (walking, ships or horse or ox-carriages). Only after the utilization of external fossil energy (first steam engines later electro- and combustion engines) the size of cities was able to increase like an explosion as shown in Figure 1.

City at 1900 (horse tramway)

City at 1950 (“tramway-city”

City today (“car-city” Figure 1 City at 1900, 1950 and today source: (Wortmann 1985)

URBAN DEVELOPMENT, SUSTAINABLE CITIES AND ITS

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Before the existence of cars a city had a compact structure. After the implementation of track based mass transport systems the city development took place along the axes of the tramways lines and could so be influenced by city planners. After the introduction and common availability of the car the city structure dissolved – the result was an extension of the city size and urban sprawl. In this stage city planning becomes very difficult/impossible since the administrative border of a city and its surroundings do not correspond any longer with the spatial dimension of the underlying transport system.

SUSTAINABILITY The next topic mentioned in the headline is “sustainable cities” or sustainability. Sustainability was first mentioned in the Brundtland report (Brundtland and World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987)It is based on the three pillars of economy, ecology and social development. Originally all of these three pillars are equally important.

Figure 2 Pillars of sustainability – as it should be (left hand side) and as it is at the moment (right hand side)

To make the concept of sustainability more applicable compared to the more qualitative description of sustainability as laid out in the Brundtland report the method of ISEW and the Ecological Footprint were developed.

GDP versus ISEW – Index of Social Economic Welfare Today’s growth oriented economy of the 1st world countries is dominating the worldwide value system. GDP and the growth of GDP are thought to be the most important indicators to measure social welfare. The birth of national accounting was in the 1930s and 1940s when essential statistical data became available. At the same time, during World War II there was great interest in allocating a nation’s money to cover the war costs. After 1945 these accounts, now called “Gross National Product” (GNP) were used to compare with the past and with other countries. Post war organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OEEC later renamed in OECD) all included GNP and the underlying accounts in their statistical bulletins. Countries in Europe, and later the Third World, which applied for Marshall Plan and other development assistance were required to present their applications using the new national accounting system (van Dieren 1995). In the 1960s the OECD set a collective target of 50% GNP growth for all member countries between 1960-1970 (Postan 1967). GNP was the headline indicator on the political agenda. And although its deficiencies were soon recognised (Usher 1963) the GNP/GDP is till today used as the main indicator to compare countries.

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Despite all these problems GNP has become a proxy for social welfare. This is partly because of a tendency to express it in per capita and thus individual terms (Cobb and Cobb 1994). Also, through the prosperous 1950s and 1960s there seemed to be a definite correlation between GNP growth and levels of general social welfare (Zolotas 1981). Only in the 1970s this began to break down. At this time (Meadows and Club of Rome. 1972) published the book “Limits to growth “ where they questioned the paradigm of everlasting growth. This heavily discussed report was a starting point for looking for better indicators to measure social welfare. Presently a series of indicators exist which are designed to measure social welfare, such as the “Genuine Progress Indicator” – GPI (Venetoulis and Cobb 2004), the “Measure of Domestic Progress – MDP (Jackson 2004), the “Human Development Index” – HDI (UNDP 2004) and the most famous one the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare called ISEW (Friend of Earth Homepage (www.foe.co.uk), (van Dieren 1995). GDP The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the amount of money being spent in an economy. It is generally reported as a measure of the country's economic well-being: the more money being spent, the higher the GDP and the better the overall economic well-being is assumed to be. However, because GDP reflects only the amount of economic activity, regardless of the effect of that activity on the community's social and environmental health, GDP can go up when overall community health goes down. E.g. when there is an accident, the GDP goes up because of the money spent on medical fees and repair. On the other hand, if people decide not to buy cars and instead walk to work, their health and wealth may increase but the GDP goes down.

ISEWa) The ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) is an alternative indicator to measure economic welfare. It is an attempt to measure the portion of economic activity which delivers genuine increases in quality of life - in a sense 'quality' economic activity. For example, economic activity causing air pollution is subtracted and unpaid household labour - such as cleaning or childminding is added. ISEW also covers areas such as income inequality, environmental damage, and depletion of environmental assets. ISEW incorporates important factors left out by GDP, such as: 1. equity and fairness of income distribution; 2. net durable capital growth; 3. national economic self-reliance (how much a nation is dependent on exports such as 'cash crops' or imports such as foreign oil); 4. natural resource depletion; 5. environmental damage; 6. nonmarket transactions (including household work and the 'informal' sector, such as gifts, reciprocal exchange, the "black market," and barter); 7. the amount and quality of leisure; 8. the extent of preventive public health measures (such as sanitation, inoculation, and disinfection); 9. 'human capital' (especially education and training); 10. infrastructure (such as mass transit, telecommunications networks, and scientific research and development facilities); 11. energy efficiency (meaning productivity per KWh of energy used); and 12. the level of public safety and services. and subtracts various 'externalities' and hidden costs that are often invisible within the formal


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economy. Subtractions of the ISEW include: 1. costs of advertising (if you spend money to advertise a product is not worth buying); 2. pollution; 3. land loss (desertification, loss of wetlands, soil erosion, and loss of croplands); 4. uncontrolled urbanization (including so-called 'suburban sprawl'); 5. unnecessary commuting (no matter how 'smart' roads are in routing traffic and reducing congestion); 6. "defensive" or responsive/reactive health spending; 7. conspicuous consumption (especially of non-durable, non-recyclable, 'junk' goods); 8. the costs of controlling crime (including the expenses of police and prisons); 9. military production (no armaments ever increase anybody's welfare); 10. "sin" production (of goods such as addictive drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, unhealthy food, and other things that lower productivity); and 11. "non-services": someone is paying somebody else to do something that they are fully capable of doing themselves, such as buying their groceries, simply because they don't have the time. a)

Definition based on “GNP vs. ISEW” by Steve Mizrach, www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/gnp-nisew.html A main advantage of the GDP is the worldwide availability and the standardised way of calculation. These are the two main reasons why it is still commonly used. Alternative indices to assess economic and social welfare are not so widespread today. There exist attempts to calculate the ISEW for a series of countries. In Figure 3 the development of the ISEW compared to the GDP for Austria, Germany, The Netherlands and USA is shown:

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Figure 3 Comparison of ISEW development and GDP development over time in different countries Source: Friends of the Earth homepage – link http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/sustainable_development/progress/international.html

As can be seen in all countries there was a time where the development of GDP and ISEW was parallel. In all cases there exists a point in time where the ISEW either stagnated or declined whereas the GDP still grew. These points in time are different for all investigated countries, but were between 1970 and 1990. It is obvious that the GDP alone, which measures only money flows within an economy, cannot reflect social welfare. Notwithstanding GDP is still THE indicator when two countries are compared to each other. Not only the GDP itself, also the growth rate of GDP are the most important targets societies are trying to maximize. Decision makers do not seem to be concerned by the fact that GDP growth is still directly linked to resource consumption. An indicator, like the GNP should be used with care, because it focuses perception of reality on a specific point. GDP which monitors money flows within an economy delivers burred perceptions and based on those wrong priorities are set. The argument of the widespread availability of GDP does not justify its use for political long term decisions.

The concept of the “Ecological Footprint” The term was first coined in 1992 by William Rees, a Canadian ecologist and professor at the University of British Columbia. In 1996, Mathis Wackernagel and Rees published OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT: REDUCING HUMAN IMPACT ON THE EARTH (Wackernagel et al. 1996). Ecological footprint (EF) analysis approximates the human impact upon the environment by calculating the draw upon ecologically productive land and marine area required to sustain a population, manufacture a product, or undertake various activities. This is achieved through a


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system of accounting similar to life cycle analysis wherein the consumption of energy, biomass (food, fiber), building material, water and other resources are converted into a normalized measure of land area dubbed 'global hectares' (GHA). Per capita EF is a means of determining relative consumption and can be a useful tool to educate people about carrying capacity and over-consumption, with the aim of altering personal behavior. Ecological footprints may be used to argue that many contemporary lifestyles are not sustainable. The average "earthshare" available to each human citizen is approximately 1.9 gha per capita. The US footprint per capita is 9.5, and that of Switzerland is 4 gha, whilst Thailand’s is approximately 1.6 gha. The WWF claims that the human footprint has exceeded the biocapacity (the available supply of natural resources) of the planet at the moment by at least 25%.

Figure 4 The Ecological footprint Source: www.footprintnetwork.org/download.php?id=6

Table 1 provides some detailed results for specific countries and continents to get a feeling about the uneven distribution of the ecological footprints between the first, second and third world.

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ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND BIOCAPACITY

2001 data World High Income Countries Middle Income Countries Low Income Countries Africa Asia-Pacific Cambodia China India Indonesia Japan Lao PDR Malaysia Thailand Viet Nam Central and Eastern Europe Latin America and the Caribbean Middle East and Central Asia North America Canada United States of America Western Europe Austria Germany United Kingdom

Population

Total Ecological Footprint

Ecological Deficit *)

(millions)

(global ha/person)

(global ha/person)

6,148.1

2.2

0.4

920.1

6.4

3.1

2,970.8

1.9

-0.1

2,226.3

0.8

0.1

810.2

1.2

-0.13

3,406.8

1.3

0.6

13.5

1.1

0.1

1,292.6

1.5

0.8

1,033.4

0.8

0.4

214.4

1.2

0.2

127.3

4.3

3.6

5.4

1.0

-0.4

23.5

3.0

1.1

61.6

1.6

0.6

79.2

0.8

0.0

336.5

3.8

-0.4

520.3

3.1

-2.4

334.3

2.1

1.1

319.1

9.2

3.9

31.0

6.4

-8.0

288.0

9.5

4.7

390.1

5.1

3.0

8.1

4.6

1.1

82.3

4.8

2.9

59.1

5.4

3.9

Table 1 Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity,Source:www.footprintnetwork.org/download.php?id=2

Summary on Sustainability I am now working in the field of sustainable transport planning for nearly two decades and in my experience I realized that the economic pillar (as shown on the right hand side in Figure 2) is much more in the heads of transport planners and decision makers than the other two. One reason for that is that transport economists have developed a great variety of methods to calculate the economic benefits of transport infrastructure to justify these huge investments. It also have to be mentioned that transport infrastructure investments are also very convenient vehicles to finance the rich people and political parties in a country and making the poorer people to believe that they also get a benefit from these investments. As long as GDP and GDP-growth is dominating the brains of decision makers and influences the


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setting of objectives in the field of transport and other political areas sustainability can never be reached. It is therefore crucial as a first step to spread the knowledge of the concept of sustainability and the knowledge of alternative, better qualified indicators, such as the ISEW or the more intuitive understandable concept of the ecological footprint to a wider audience of decision makers and politicians. It is obvious that environmental and social issues must get a much higher weight in transport appraisal otherwise our societies end up with too much infrastructure for the wrong means of transport – the car.

WHICH MEANS OF TRANSPORT DO FIT TO A SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT ? To answer this question we have to compare the different means of transport regarding their energy and space requirements, and the direct negative impacts on the environment (noise, air pollution, accidents, climate change, etc…). Space The following graph shows the space consumption for the different means of transport Area consumption [m²/person] 70 60.0

60 50 40 32.1

30 17.6

20

12.0

7.7

10 1.0

0 g lkin Wa

g clin Cy

) 0% s (2 Bu

ay mw T ra

%) (2 0 M

e( rbik oto

1.2

s) per

r (1 Ca

) ers .4 p

Figure 5 Space consumption per means of transport source: Pfaffenbichler, P. (2001). "Verkehrsmittel und Strukturen." Wissenschaft & Umwelt Interdisziplinär(3), 35-42., own additional calculations

As can be seen, a car needs 60 times more space than a pedestrian, and also a motorbike needs more than 32 times more space. So every transport policy instrument which shifts a single person from walking to car-driving increases the space consumption by 60 square meters in a city. This will have significant impacts on future city structures especially in SE-Asia. Although public transport also need more space than walking (between 12 and 17 times) these means of transport are by the factor 4 to 5 better than cars. As mentioned before, since the location of public transport lines can be controlled by city planers (respectively transport operators) it is possible to influence the development of the urban structure, because urban development will take place alongside these public transport corridors.

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Energy

Primary Energy [MJpr/trip]

Vehicle Production

Operation

30 25 20 15

21.8

10 8.5 5 0

0.7

5.6 0.4

Cycling

Bus

0.0

Walking

6.3 0.2

1.3 4.0

Tramway Motorbike Car (Golf type)

Figure 6: Energy consumption per trip per means of transport source: (Pfaffenbichler 1998)

Figure 6 shows the primary energy needs for the different means of transport for vehicle production and operation per trip. In this calculation the life time and the average number of trips was taken into consideration, so these figures are valid for Austrian context. As it can be seen no external energy is assumed for a walking trip. For a cycle trip only energy for production is necessary. For a bus trip 0.4 MJ for production and 5,6MJ for operation are necessary. A tramway trip needs 0.2 MJ for production and 6.3 MJ for operation, a motorbike some 1.3 MJ for production and 8.5 MJ for operation, an a car trip consumes 4.4 MJ for production and 21.8 MJ for operation. By calculation the relative values for the total energy consumption the following results can be obtained: Cycle / Bus / Tramways / Motorbike / Car is equal to 1 / 8.6 / 9.3 / 14.0 / 36.9. Every transport policy instrument which changes the behaviour of human beings to use a cycle instead of a car saves per trip 25.1 MJ of fossil energy and reduces additionally the environmental burden for noise pollution, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and accident costs. And also policy instruments which transfer people from car use to public transport use save some 19.3 MJ per trip. Just to provide an idea how much energy are 25 MJ (single car trip), 25 MJ are equivalent the energy content of 160 kg rice or the energy amount need to heat 50 litres of water from 0 degree Celsius to 100 degree Celsius.

Summary In both comparisons (space, energy) the car has by far the worst values. Regarding the space consumption the car is 4 to 5 times less sustainable than public transport, and regarding energy consumption at least 4 times less efficient than public transport. Beside that, car traffic is responsible (at least in Europe) for nearly 100% of traffic congestion, air pollution, noise emissions and accidents costs in cities. So from a sustainability point of view car transport does not fit to a sustainable urban development.


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Following from that it is necessary to enable an urban development which favours environmentally friendly means of transport instead of investing in not sustainable means of transport – the car. In this context it is very important to know that in complex systems, as our cities are today, exists something called path-dependency and system inertia. I will explain this using an example from Europe. In Europe the rail was invented around 1850 in the UK. From there the technology was spread all over Europe and the rest of the world, but not in a standardized way. The result of this process was that at present there exist several different gauge widths within Europe and the used power supply and signalling systems are different, too. All present efforts to harmonize these different developments are doomed to failure because the built up structure became unchangeable because of the quantity of the existing tracks. The same dependency happened and happens in Europe and USA and now also in SE-Asia with the car transport system, and people, decision makers and transport planers do not see this development.

ITS – INSTRUMENTS AND THEIR IMPACTS ON THE TRANSPORT SYSTEM Coming to the third word group in the heading of the paper , the word group “ITS”. ITS stands for Intelligent Transport Systems. In common sense under ITS transport planners understand computer aided tools to improve the capacities and/or flow speeds of existing transport systems. And here again I have to make a very critical remark. Looking at the applications of ITS in Europe, USA and Japan (1st world) ITS is mainly used to improve the car-transport-system. Vehicles are equipped with route planners, sophisticated gadgets which can calculate the “optimal” route for the individual car user by taking real time traffic flow data into account and make so the car traffic more attractive. High-tech traffic control centres are bought and set up in all major cities around the world, calculating and applying optimal traffic light signalling schemes to increase the road capacity and flow speed. But did these systems solve problems in any city? In my experience the answer is no – they may postpone the problem for some years but these systems do not solve it. The following Figure 7 shows the overall system behaviour of a transport system using the so called Causal Loop Diagramming (CLD) technique1.

1

CLD syntax The syntax of the CLD-method is very simple - there exist just arrows and the signs "+" and "-". But it is crucial to understand the meaning of "+" and "-". The following table explains the used symbols:

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+ +

Highways being built

Need for new highways

Number of Highways

+

-

+

+ Number of traffic jams

Attractiveness of driving on highways

+

Figure 7 Causal loop diagram – effects of infrastructure provision source: (Roberts et al. 1983), page48

A traditional transport planner perceives most of the time only the problem of congestion (Number of traffic jams). To mitigate this problem he suggests to increase the road capacity and the result will be less congestion, but only in the short run (as depicted with left hand side causal loop). The reason for that is depicted in the right hand side causal loop – more infrastructure increases the attractiveness of car-traffic and this will lead in the long term to more car traffic and therefore in more congestion. This overall system behaviour was already recognized in the early 1980ies, but even today there exist transport planners, who still believe that an increase in road capacity will solve the congestion problems. The sam,e feed back loops are true for most existing ITS measures as depicted in Figure 8:

+

-

-

The arrow is used to show causation. The item at the tail of the arrow causes a change in the item at the head of the arrow The "+" sign near the arrowhead indicates that the item at the tail of the arrow and the item at the head of the arrow change in the same direction. If the tail increases, the head increases; if the tail decreases, the head decreases. The "-" sign near the arrowhead indicates that the item at the tail of the arrow and the item at the head of the arrow change in the opposite direction. If the tail increases, the head decreases; if the tail decreases, the head increases. In causal loop diagrams, each arrow also represents time passing, or delays. Sometimes the delay is a matter of seconds; in other situations, delays could be centuries. Perceiving the length of delays is sometimes quite important in understanding the behaviour of a system. The symbol in causal loop diagramming for displaying delays is "//". Its purpose is to highlight time lags, which are significantly longer than usual delays within the system.


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+ +

Implementation of ITS-systems

Need for more capacity

Road capacity

+

-

+

+ Number of traffic jams

Attractiveness of driving on highways

+

Figure 8 causal loop diagram – effects of ITS-instruments, own adaptations

Classification of existing ITS-Applications The following table uses the ITS classification as derived in the EU-funded ERTICO project. In this project the existing applications under the main areas traffic management, payment systems, collective and public transport management, traffic and travel information and freight transport management were classified.

Area

Application Tool

Means of Transport

effect

Traffic management

Access control

car

both – decrease and increase

Environmental traffic management

car


Highway management

car

increase in Car- attractiveness

Intersection control

car


Parking management

car


Ramp metering

car


Supervisory management

car


Traffic regulation enforcement

car


Urban incident management

car


Urban intelligent speed adaptation

car


Urban traffic control

car


Vulnerable road user facilities

car

n/a

Public transport payment systems

pt

increase in PT- attractiveness

Parking payment systems

car


Urban tolling

car


Advanced urban road pricing

car


Payment systems

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Collective and public Fleet and resource management pt transport management

Traffic and travel information

Freight transport management

Security and emergency management


Public transport priority

pt


Car pooling/sharing management

car


Demand-responsive transport

pt


Pre-trip journey planning

car


Public transport information

pt


Route guidance and navigation

car


Traffic information

car


Co-ordinated city logistics

truck

increase of road transport- attractiveness

Fleet management

truck


Freight management

truck


Hazardous goods management

truck


Rescue service incident management

car

n/a

Breakdown and emergency alert car


Public transport security


pt

Table 2 ITS Instruments as classified within the ERTICO project source: http://www.konsult.leeds.ac.uk/private/level2/instruments/instrument024/l2_024a.htm, own adaptations

In total 31 individual applications of ITS-Instruments were listed in ERTICO project. 25 of these instruments are related to road traffic (4 of them are related to road freight transport) and 6 are public transport related. No ITS applications exist to support the city adequate and environmentalfriendly modes walking and cycling. The majority (16 out of 26) of car related tools has the effect to increase the attractiveness of car traffic and will therefore increase the car usage, too. 8 ITS-instruments will have both effects – increase and decrease of car-attractiveness at the same time – which of these effects may be quantitative stronger depends on the detailed implementation of these instruments (for example the charge level of road pricing). The six public transport instruments can be categorized in four groups – better information provision for public transport users, faster transport, more efficient operations and improved security. All these measures increase the attractiveness of public transport. It is however questionable whether these measures are strong enough to overcompensate the car related instruments. One example from Austria: At the moment there is the discussion to install a ticket for public transport – the so called “Austria-ticket”. An Austria-ticket is a personalized public transport ticket which enables the owner to use any public transport service within Austria independently from the public transport operator. The owner can use the bus, the rail, the subways, the ferries etc with this ticket. Additionally the ticket should have a so called best-price-guarantee. This means, if the user just uses the public transport system once a day he has to pay for a single trip, in the case the user travels several times a day he/she is charged for day-ticket, in the case he uses the public


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transport system several times a week / a month / a year he/she is charged guaranteed the best price (weekly/monthly/yearly ticket). This kind of ticket reduces the barriers of using public transport significantly.

Summary on ITS- Instruments In general both types of instruments (ITS instruments for car and public transport) will have the effect to make the mechanised means of transport more attractive and will so have very negative impacts on walking and cycling. ITS systems which are developed to improve car traffic are from a system point of view counter productive and will by no means contribute towards sustainable urban development.

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND ITS FEEDBACK WITH LAND USE To understand the travel behaviour of human beings we need to look on empirical data first. The average daily trip rate in western European countries is more or less constant. A person living in the UK makes some 1000 trips a year – this figure is relatively constant for the last 30 years (where data are available). In other words a human being needs to carry out a certain number of location changes (trips) to fulfil his/her needs of earning money (commuting), shopping, leisure and social contacts.

Time series - number of trips in the UK 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200

20 04

3 20 0

20 02

19 72 /1 97 3 19 75 /1 97 6 19 78 /1 97 9 19 85 /1 98 6 19 89 /1 99 1 19 92 /1 99 4 19 95 /1 99 7 19 98 /2 00 0

-

Figure 9 Number of trips in the UK – time series 1972 to 2004 Source: http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_039316.xls

On the other hand also the average travel time per person stayed relatively constant over time as shown in Figure 10:

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5.0 African Villages in: I Tanzania, 1986 II Ghana, 1988

4.5

City Surveys: 1 Tianjin (China), 1993 2 Kazanlik (Bulgaria), 1965/66 3 Lima-Callao (Peru), 1965/66 4 Pskov (Former USSR), 1965/66 5 Maribor (Former Yugoslavia), 1965/66 6 Kragujevac (F. Yugoslavia), 1965/66 7 Torun (Poland), 1965/66 8 Gyoer (Hungary), 1965/66 9 Olomouc (Former CSFR), 1965/66 10 Hoyerswerde (Former GDR), 1965/66 11 Sao Paulo (Brazil), 1987 12 Sao Paulo (Brazil), 1977 13 Warsaw (Poland), 1993 14 6 Cities (France), 1965/66 15 Osnabruck (Germany), 1965/66 16 44 Cities (USA), 1965/66 17 Jackson (USA), 1965/66 18 Paris (France), 1976

Travel Time Budegt, h/cap/d

4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Paris (France), 1983 Paris (France), 1991 Sendai (Japan), 1972 Sapporo (Japan), 1972 Kanazawa (Japan), 1974 Kagoshima (Japan), 1974 Kumamoto (Japan), 1973 Hamamatsu (Japan), 1975 Fukui (Japan), 1977 Niigata (Japan), 1978 Hiroshima (Japan), 1978 Osaka (Japan), 1980 Tokyo (Japan), 1980 Osaka (Japan), 1985 Tokyo (Japan), 1985 Cities No. 21-29 in 1987 Tokyo (Japan), 1990 Osaka (Japan), 1990

PARIS

2.0 3

2

1.5

1

1.0

I

II

6

7 5 9

4

12 11 A

10

0.5

USA

CH

18

13

8

20 19 G 16 31 D B J H 17 K P R 35 22 N 33 21 23 25 29 32 T 30 M 36 E F 14 15 24 28 C I 26 27 34 Q

National Travel Surveys: A Belgium, 1965/66 B Austria, 1983 C Great Britain, 1985/86 D Germany, 1976 E Netherlands, 1979 F Great Britain, 1989/91 G Finland, 1986 H Netherlands, 1987 I France, 1984 J Germany, 1982 K Netherlands, 1989 L USA, 1990 M Germany, 1989 N Switzerland, 1984 O Switzerland, 1989 P Australia, 1986 Q Singapore, 1991 R Norway, 1985 S Norway, 1992 T Japan, 1987

O S

L

GB

Source: Schafer and Victor (2000)

0.0 0

5000

10000

15000

GDP/cap, US$(1985)

Figure 10 Average travel time per day and GDP per capita Source:(Schafer 2000)

So what happens in the transport system if people do not make more trips and do not spend less time for travelling – the only possible explanation is that they travel further to fulfil their needs. And again there is empirical evidence that this is true, for example in the UK, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11 distance travelled per person per year by main means of transport source: http://www.transtat.dft.gov.uk/

If we assume this empirical evidence is true then the result is that the structure of our settlements has changed. To go shopping, to be able to work, to meet friends longer distance have to be

20000


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undertaken, and to be able to do this faster, less sustainable means of transport have to be used.

OVERALL CONCLUSIONS The structure of an urban settlement depends strongly onto the underlying transport system. The faster the transport system the more disperse the settlement structure will be. Human beings spend on average between 1 and 1.5 hours a day for travelling independently of the availability of cars, and carry out about 1000 trips a year to fulfil their needs for their daily life (social contacts, leisure, shopping, commuting, etc.). At present the indicator GDP is dominating in setting the overarching objectives of our society. On the other hand GDP favours only the economic pillar in the concept of sustainability and should therefore replaced with more sophisticated concepts such as the ISEW and and/or the ecological footprint. The expectations on ITS-Instruments to solve existing transport problems are completely exaggerated. By understanding the overall system behaviour of the transport/land use system over time these instruments only reduce the problems in the short run, but at the same time they are the cause for the similar, but bigger problems in the future. This paper tried to put a critical light on the application of ITS measures and I hope some arguments will be taken into consideration when SE-Asian cities think of spending money in this kind of policy instruments in the future.

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