Our world is changing fast, with abundant opportunities, new risks, and vulnerabilities that must be managed. As countries fundamentally reconfigure to adapt, making the right public choices in transport and mobility have become more challenging than ever.
For a long time, decisions on which investment to make, or policy to choose in transport have been made on a project-by-project basis, and often by mode of transportation. The view was that in the end, all these projects will add up to generating a fully cost-efficient transportation system.
Four key dynamics are driving a reset in transport decision-making, and a necessary departure in focus from a siloed, project-by-project approach to a new system-wide approach centered on reaching high-level goals.
1. The SDGs and Paris Climate Agreement have compelled countries to rethink their domestic agendas in service of higher-level goals, global targets, and the wellbeing of the planet. It is therefore essential to define and align transport-specific policy goals with the SDGs to translate the international commitments into specific policy and investment action in transport.
2. Data and new technologies continue to offer possibilities to increase the effectiveness in the way transport decisions are made. Data combined with artificial intelligence, if well- leveraged, could generate new insights for better policies, better functioning transportation systems, plans for future needs, and new incentives for customer behavior changes.
3. A new governance paradigm encourages a new model of decision making, which emphasizes more decentralization, more transparency, accountability, and greater citizen engagement. The transport sector thus has to adopt a more inclusive, participatory, and where applicable decentralized governance in cases where major impacts—for example, reduction in transport emissions—can be achieved through policy changes at the city level than at the national level.
4. Equity and inclusion occupy greater significance in this new world. The transport sector has to respond to growing concerns of both horizontal and vertical dimensions of equity. The urban and rural aspects of transport represent horizontal equity of location, and gender represents a piece of vertical equity, considering specific demographic profiles of individuals.
Source: Vandycke Nancy and Viegas José, Book: “Sustainable Mobility in a Fast-Changing World: from Concept to Action”, (forthcoming)”