Public transport

The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce the use of cars is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions. Here, we model the use of various modes of transport in a city by aggregating Active mobility (A), Public Transport (B) and Cars (C), expressing the modal share of a city by its ABC triplet. Data for nearly 800 cities across 61 countries is used to model car use and its relationship with city size and income. Our findings suggest that with longer distances and the congestion experienced in large cities, Active mobility and journeys by Car are less frequent, but Public Transport is more prominent. Further, income is strongly related to the use of cars. Results show that a city with twice the income has 37% more journeys by Car. Yet, there are significant differences across regions. For cities in Asia, Public Transport contributes to a substantial share of their journeys. For cities in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of their mobility depends on Cars, regardless of city size. In Europe, there are vast heterogeneities in their modal share, from cities with mostly Active mobility (like Utrecht) to cities where Public Transport is crucial (like Paris or London) and cities where more than two out of three of their journeys are by Car (like Rome and Manchester).

Melbourne’s Missing Middle’s signature recommendation—a new Missing Middle Zone—would enable six-storey, mixed-use development on all residential land within 1 kilometre of a train station and 500 metres of a tram stop—building an interconnected network of 1,992 high-amenity, walkable neighbourhoods.
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Melbourne’s Missing Middle envisions Parisian streetscapes across all of inner urban Melbourne, along our train and tram lines and near our town centres. Gentle, walk-up apartments, abundant shopfronts, sidewalk cafes and sprawling parks replacing unaffordable and unsustainable cottages. 
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The Missing Middle is the most desirable, walkable urban form, typified by inner Paris, and it should be legal to build in our most desirable, economically productive areas.

• In short: Data detailing the air quality at Melbourne's Southern Cross Station has been released for the first time.
• It shows nitrogen dioxide levels in parts of the station have regularly been more than 90 times the guidelines set by the World Health Organization.
• The Victorian government and the station's operator say they've been meeting Australian workplace standards.

The policy has been tested in cities from Richmond and Alexandria, Virginia to Kansas City, Missouri and Olympia, Washington. And last fall, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority — which operates the nation’s largest public transportation network — announced a fare-free pilot program of its own.

The logic is simple: if most roads are toll-free, shouldn’t public transportation be fare-free?

I spoke recently with Christopher Ramirez from the group Together for Brothers, which led a coalition backing free fares in Albuquerque.

“We had a couple sessions with the young men of color we were working with,” he told me. “We were asking: What are some of the biggest problems and root causes in our community? Without a doubt, in all the sessions, it was access to transportation.”

As Ramirez recalled, “During one of the strategy sessions, one of our high school students said, ‘Why don’t we just make it free for everybody?’ and we laughed. By the next week, we realized he wasn’t joking. By the end of the month, we decided to include it in our campaign.”

In May, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S., giving 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a “mobility wallet” — a debit card with $150 per month to spend on transportation.

The catch? Funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or even purchase an e-bike — but they can’t be spent on the cost of owning or operating a car.

The year-long pilot, ending in April, has the dual goals of increasing mobility for low-income residents and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a radical experiment based on a simple idea: People know what they need. Give them the money to go where they want to go, and they will improve the quality of their lives.

It’s the biggest experiment in Universal Basic Mobility in the U.S., but it is not the first. 

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head.  At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs.  From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage. Artificial scarcity also creates growth dependencies: because survival is mediated by prices and wages, when productivity improvements and recessions lead to unemployment people suffer loss of access to essential goods — even when the output of those goods is not affected — and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis.

There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.

The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

The French city of Montpellier in southern France became the latest European metropolis to allow all its residents to ride public transport for free.

The entire European country of Luxembourg including its capital of the same name scrapped fares in 2020, after Estonia’s capital Tallinn introduced the policy in 2013.

From Thursday evening, Montpellier residents with a special pass were able to ride trams and buses free of charge in the southern city.

Visitors and tourists will still have to pay 1.60 euro ($1.70) a trip.

Michael Delafosse, the Socialist mayor of the city of 500,000 people, promised free public transport when he was elected in 2020.

This report provides an assessment of how well public transport is accounted for in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

We can reduce urban emissions and decarbonise people’s daily mobility faster, more reliably and affordably with public transport and active mobility.

Society will benefit from every increase in modal share to public transport, through fewer road fatalities and injuries, more inclusive access to opportunities, reduced congestion, improved air quality and freeing up space in our cities.

The first Global Stocktake (GST) shows we are off track, but what national policies and measures are already in place in NDCs and what are the opportunities for more climate action with public transport over this critical decade?

This report identifies a range of options for more ambitious NDCs, which can form the basis of an outline policy template for public transport and active mobility. Building capacity to support its adoption and implementation can provide the strong foundation necessary to progressively and effectively enhance climate ambition.