Sustainable Transport Still Possible for Asian Cities, ADB Official Tells Nagoya Conference

NAGOYA, JAPAN (3 August 2005) - Rapid urbanization and motorization are exacting a high economic, social, and environmental cost in Asia's cities, which must adopt measures to make transport more sustainable, a senior ADB official told an international conference on transport today.

While Asia's rapidly expanding urbanization has strengthened economic activity in the region, it has also had negative impacts on the environment and on vulnerable groups like the poor, said Bindu Lohani, Director General of ADB's Regional and Sustainable Development Department.

He was speaking at the opening of a Symposium on Environment and Transport, a component of the International Conference on Environment and Transport being held in Aichi, Japan this week.

"About 70 percent of the world's poor live in Asia," Mr. Lohani said. "If present trends continue, it is to be expected that the number of urban poor will exceed the rural poor population in many of the Asian countries. This is an important challenge for institutions like ADB, which have poverty reduction as their overarching objective."

In most cases transport is the largest contributor to ambient air pollution, especially particulate matter and ground-level ozone, he said. In addition, a rapid increase in the number of vehicles has also resulted in a higher number of traffic accidents, while inadequate public transport infrastructure has increased traffic congestion.

"Asia is running out of options and sustainable transport solutions are the way forward," he said. "In many instances, previous policies focused on the construction of additional roads infrastructure and this has strongly affected the urban quality of life and has gone on at the expense of more environmentally sustainable transport systems like non-motorized transport and low-cost bus rapid transit (BRT) systems."

Mr. Lohani also reiterated ADB's support for sustainable transport projects. Transport continues to be an important sector for ADB, accounting for 31% of total lending for the period of 2000-2003.

He concluded his speech with five key measures that cities should take:

• Cities should make an active attempt to calculate the economic costs of air pollution, road accidents, and congestion. This will help to raise awareness and provide the economic rationale for comprehensive action.
• Cities need to develop pro-public transport policies. As part of this, they need to ensure that road user taxes, charges and other fees are not subsiding private car users at the expense of public transport and non-motorized transport. This needs to be part of an overall financing plan for sustainable urban transport.
• Cities need to emphasize the importance of non-motorized (NMT) transport, formulate an NMT action plan and set an example by creating high profile pedestrianized areas.
• Cities need to ensure that there are roadmaps in place for the introduction of cleaner vehicles and fuels and take advantage of the emerging new technologies.
• Cities need to develop sustainable land-use plans which prioritizes the movement of goods and persons and not of vehicles. In so doing, cities need to develop the required regulatory frameworks, the institutional and organizational capacity, to implement such sustainable land-use plans.

Read the full speech.

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