| URBAN TRANSPORT AND POVERTY Urban poverty may be reduced through the contribution which transport makes to the efficiency of the urban economy and so to the overall growth of incomes. Urban transport policies can also be focused more specifically on meeting the needs of the poor. Inability to access jobs and services is an important element of the social exclusion which defines urban poverty. Accessibility is important not only for its role in facilitating regular and stable income earning employment, but also as a part of the social capital which maintains the social relations forming the safety net of poor people in many societies. The urban poor face a complex trade-off between residential location, travel distance, and travel mode, in an attempt to minimize the social exclusion associated with low earning potential. The "income poor" may in fact have chosen poorly served peripheral locations precisely because they are the places where their overall welfare (in terms of availability of shelter, access to activities, etc) is best served. High transport cost is then a symptom of their poverty rather than its fundamental cause. Though poverty reduction has for long been the main objective of the World Bank, the mid-1990s saw a major debate on the relative roles of economic growth and more direct forms of poverty reduction. This debate spilled into all economic sectors, including transport, and led to a renewed effort in poverty-focused data collection, analytic constructs, and procedures for lending operations. The debate is on-going but its intermediate major finding is that overall economic growth is the most effective means of poverty reduction. In the urban transport field, interventions that are particularly effective in generating growth may also be particularly effective in raising incomes of poor people. Other important findings are that much previous public expenditure in social sectors has been poorly targeted and had little demonstrable effect (in the aggregate) on either distribution or growth, whereas policies to improve market functioning have yielded proportional benefits to poor people. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that low income is not the only form of deprivation. Gender confers some particular disadvantages in terms of diffused trip patterns and timings, as well as particular vulnerability to safety and security problems. Age and infirmity pose rather different problems, calling for sensitive "inclusive" design of physical facilities. Both locational resettlement and occupational redeployment impinge in a particularly harsh way on poor people, requiring adequate safety nets. Inadequate and congested urban transport is damaging to the city economy and harms both rich and poor. Unfortunately, the common solution of increasing road capacity in an attempt to speed up the movement of vehicles, acting against informal public transport modes and maintaining low-fare, public monopoly in the provision of transport services has proved to be both ineffective and inequitable. Moving towards a more poverty-focused transport policy would require the following: urban transport planning studies should take a more demand-oriented approach, recognizing the existence of distinct socio-economic communities already at the data collection, diagnostic and design stages; the importance of walking, other non-motorized transport activities and the special needs of the mobility impaired should be recognized both in infrastructure design and in traffic management; design of public transport fare policies has to be based on more than the commonly used criterion of affordability; a nominally a pro-poor policy of charging low fares without an assured deficit finance mechanism has proved to leak benefits and lead to service deterioration; there should be increased use of targeting, whether group-oriented or location-oriented, both in service design and fare policies; transport being only one of services essential for the welfare, fare policies in the transport sector have to be designed taking into consideration policies in other sectors; uncontested monopoly in the supply of public transport services should be replaced by regulated competition; this is likely to decrease costs and increase supply to poor people; policies for regulating the informal transport sector need to be framed with their impacts on poor people carefully taken into account, lest the poor be the losers in the anti-congestion drives; efforts to secure modal integration need to be carefully managed to ensure that they do not increase the number of times poor people have to pay per trip, and that fares on the services on which they are particularly dependent do not increase.
Based on these principles there is a rich agenda of urban transport policies which are both pro-growth and pro-poor, yet which are consistent with the fiscal capabilities of even the relatively poorest countries.
PUBLICATIONS Urban Transport and Poverty: The Case of MumbaiJudy Baker, Rakhi Basu, Maureen Cropper, Somik , Akie Takeuchi
September 2005
This paper reports the results of a survey of 5,000 households in the Greater Mumbai Region conducted in the winter of 2004. The goal of the survey was to better understand the demand for transport services by the poor, the factors affecting this demand, and the inter-linkages between transport decisions and other vital decisions such as where to live and work. This paper, the first of several research outputs, describes the salient facts about travel patterns in Mumbai for both poor and non-poor households. Transport Investment, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction(PDF, 207KB)
Zhi Liu
Journal of Transport and Infrastructure, under The Asian Journal, Volume 12, Number 1, August 2005.
An earlier version of this paper was presented in the UNESCAPIAITD
Conference on Transport and Millennium Development Goals, held in Delhi, on
April 14-15, 2005. TWU-30. Poverty and Transport
Colin A. Gannon and Zhi Liu, September 1997
Executive Summary - Full Paper (PDF, 186KB)
This paper (a) summarizes current knowledge of the links between poverty and transport; (b) identify good practice with respect to the role of transport in an overall poverty alleviation strategy; (c) defines the role of the Bank in developing and implementing actions to address poverty issues in transport operations; and (d) suggests avenues for collaboration with other stakeholders in the sector (users, suppliers, governments, non-governmental organizations, and community groups) to increase “grass-roots” understanding and improve the effectiveness of actions to reduce poverty and its consequences.
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