[sustran] initial reaction to WBCSD Mobility 2001 study

[mobility]

Our Ten Cents on a Ten Million Dollar Study

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has just
released a new $10 million study called Mobility 2001, that was written
under their supervision by MIT and Charles River Associates.  It is
available online at www.wbcsdmobility.org.   ITDP will draft comments on
the study.  Your input is welcome.  Please send comments to
mobility at igc.org

The auto and oil industries had two conflicting aims with this study:
1)  assessing whether or not they have a future, 2) subtly promoting
their agenda in the face of mounting criticism.   The study doesn't
entirely succeed on either of these counts.  It extols the automobile,
while recognizing the problems that its growing use causes.  It suffers
from a tendency to generalize from US experience to developing
countries, which would no doubt be better off deciding for themselves
whether a future of automobile dependency in the face of rapidly
shrinking oil supplies is a good idea.


Initial Reaction to Mobility 2001 by the WBCSD

The study is largely descriptive, rather than prescriptive, and much of
this description is reasonably accurate.  Its overview of pollution
trends, traffic trends are reasonable.  However, it frequently suffers
from over-generalizing trends from the US.

Comments like "conventional public transport systems are best at serving
high levels of travel demand...areas that typically meet these criteria
include the urban core and the high density corridors between the core
and the suburbs," were written with the US in mind.  "Public transport"
in developing countries is almost non-existent, being all but replaced
by paratransit and private bus transport, and these services make a
profit even in distant peripheral areas.

It characterizes the problem of urban sprawl, for example, as a direct
result of growing private motor vehicle use, whereas in developing
countries most people living in sprawling settlements do not own cars
and are pushed to the periphery by a low income housing crisis.

Much time is spent extolling the alleged freedom of private motor
vehicles: "Privately owned motor vehicles are typically the most
flexible means of providing mobility."   Sitting in a traffic jam and
searching for a parking space seems far less flexible to many of us than
walking or biking to a busway or subway, then walking somewhere else,
without having to worry about parking, refueling, maintaining the
vehicle, theft, or crashing the vehicle.   A flexible system is one
where people have many choices about how to make a trip, not a system of
automobile dependence.

The authors claim that developing country cities "house and transport
too many people, on insufficient numbers of poorly maintained roads and
rails, and generally lack the money and institutional vigor to fix the
problem."  There exists, unfortunately, no accepted mechanism for
determining the 'sufficiency' of a road network, nor an appropriate
urban density.  Japan has managed to produce higher levels of per capita
GNP than the US, with a fraction of the level of road infrastructure.
Many developing country cities, like Curitiba and Bogota, have done a
far better job than Houston or Los Angeles in fixing transport sector
problems.

Even in the first world, the report claims that "highway infrastructure
needs to be increased," though it admits "it is not possible to build
our way out of congestion."   To much of the world, it looks like the US
has enough roads.  Should the rest of the world pay, with flooded
coastlines, for the luxury of US drivers to continue to generate
greenhouse gases?

The report says that 96% of transportation relies on oil forgeting that
in Africa 70% of  freight is moved by headloading, and in countries like
India and China a majority of trips continue to be made by non-motorized
means.  Oil is clearly the number one fuel.  Perhaps food is the second
most important fuel, but it is not mentioned.

Given that large oil companies funded the study, one would expect a
thorough review of the risks and ramifications of the world's limited
fuel reserves.In fact the analysis is limited to quotes from the
International Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy that global
fuel consumption will double in 25 - 28 years, and that a transition to
non-oil energy sources will be necessary beginning in the next 20 - 50
years, with oil prices estimated to rise only marginally (from a current
price around $22 to around $25 a barrel) by 2020.  This is a great deal
of uncertainty given that whole economies can be made or broken by fuel
price volatility.