Governance and Sustainable Urban Transport in the Americas

Jean Mercier, Fanny Tremblay-Racicot, Mario Carrier, Fábio Duarte

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319990903
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319990910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores the governance patterns of three cities of the Americas, Seattle, Montreal, and Curitiba, which all present different but interesting  cases in dealing with  sustainable urban transport challenges. The authors study empirical  data from these three cities to analyze how specific governmental and policy instruments (planning, consultation and market mechanisms for example) were  implemented in each case. Through concepts coming from policy studies and  sociology, for example,  such as path dependency, institutional culture  and transaction costs, the three cities are also looked at in a broader perspective in order to better understand how they deal differently with  their common challenges.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jean Mercier, Fanny Tremblay-Racicot, Mario Carrier and Fábio DuarteGovernance and Sustainable Urban Transport in the Americashttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99091-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jean Mercier¹ , Fanny Tremblay-Racicot² , Mario Carrier³ and Fábio Duarte⁴

(1)

Université Laval, Québec, QC, Canada

(2)

École nationale d’administration publique, Québec, QC, Canada

(3)

Université Laval, Québec, QC, Canada

(4)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Jean Mercier (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Fanny Tremblay-Racicot

Email: [email protected]

Mario Carrier

Email: [email protected]

Fábio Duarte

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The authors begin by pointing out to the reasons why studying sustainable urban transport is pertinent at this time of human history. Indeed, although cities only occupy 2% of the earth’s landmass, they produce 75% of total greenhouse gases (GHG). The world population living in cities now stands at 50%, and this proportion is growing steadily. The authors then point to the fact that, although other sectors of the world economy have seen progress in working on reducing greenhouse gases, particularly in the energy production and manufacturing sectors, there is no progress in the transport sector, where in fact the situation is getting worse year by year. Yet, the authors conclude, there is little comparative work or longitudinal studies on these important subjects. The chapter then offers a comprehensive list of factors affecting urban transport, divided into upstream factors, such as climate, over which public authorities have little control, and downstream factors, such as policy and policy instruments, where they can act more directly and proactively. Finally, the three cities studied, Seattle, Montreal, and Curitiba are presented and reasons are given for choosing them as cities that have a story to tell on sustainable urban transport.

Keywords

Urban transportCitiesGreenhouse gasesComparative studies

End Abstract

1.1 Reducing Greenhouse Gases in Urban Areas

This book is about cities and, more specifically, about sustainable transport in cities and metropolitan areas of the Americas.

More than 50% of the world population now lives in cities “and city governments face a wide range of challenges: they need to produce wealth and innovation but also health and sustainability” (Meijer and Rodriguez Bolivar 2015, 2).

While cities cover no more than 2% of the earth’s landmass, “it is estimated that they consume 75 percent of the planet’s resources and produce 75 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and are responsible for massive amounts of waste, pollution, and environmental degradation, of which the consequences are felt far beyond their territorial boundaries” (Bouteligier 2013, 8).

But if cities can be part of the problem, they can also be part of the solution, and “the confrontation with unsustainable situations leads to a quest for solutions [… and] cities will be important for realizing a shift to more sustainable global urban lifestyles” (Bouteligier 2013, 164), in good part because “they have particular advantages, such as economies of scale and proximity for infrastructure and services and the potential to become more energy efficient at relatively low cost” (4). This may be why the twenty-first century has been described as the beginning of the urban millennium.

It would be an exaggeration to say that cities are alone in responding to the challenges before them. There are other levels of governments and other actors in civil society. But ever since the alarm was sounded about growing greenhouse gases (GHG), the senior governments, and most notably national governments, have been slow to act (Barber 2013, 6, 19), to the point that some observers have concluded that “we have no politics of climate change” (Bache et al. 2015, 70). Considering this, “the city now looms large on the international climate change agenda” (Bulkeley and Betsill 2013, 136).

One of the policy domains where cities and metropolitan areas are facing the most pressing challenges is the policy for urban transport .

Among the three large sectors of the economy producing GHG , energy, industrial production and transport, it is the transport sector where the progress in reducing GHG is generally considered the least successful. In fact, GHG caused by transport continues, especially in the Americas (US Climate Action Report 2010; International Energy Agency 2013) to increase unabated, from year to year, two decades after the adoption of the Kyoto protocol. Considering, as stated earlier, that about half of humans are presently living in cities , and increasingly in quite large cities, it seems pertinent to look at how some cities from the Americas are doing better than others in urban transport and in containing the increase in private automobile use and in increasing public transit and non-motorized transportation (NMT), policies that are reputed to decrease greenhouse gas production from urban transportation . We can refer to cities that try to reach these goals as cities which have sustainable urban transportation systems, and one method of determining their level of success is by looking at what is called the “modal split”, i.e. the proportion of mobility assured by each mode, the private automobile, public transit, walking, and biking, essentially.

Drawing on figures from the modal split statistics of cities of the Americas, we have identified three cities with a respectable proportion of their mobility assured through public transit and NMT. These cities are the US city of Seattle , the Canadian city of Montreal , and, finally, the Brazilian city of Curitiba . Data on these statistics are presented in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1

Modal split in Seattle, Curitiba, and Montreal (2016)

Mode/city		Total transit and active modes (%)	Drive alone and motor bikes (%)	Carpooling (%)	Transit (%)	Bike (%)	Walk (%)	Work at home (%)	Other (%)
Seattle^a	Metro area	16.1	67.1	9.7	10.4	1.3	4.4	6.0	1.2
	City	35.7	48.1	7.1	21.0	3.5	11.2	7.6	1.6
Montreal^b	Metro area	30.9	65.1	3.2	23.5	2.1	5.3	N.A.	1.0
	City (island/agglo.)	47.0	53.0		35.0	4.0	8.0	N.A.	1.0
Curitiba^c	Metro area	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.
	City	70.0	27.0	N.A.	45.0	5.0	20.0	N.A.	3.0

^aSources Metro area: Census Reporter (2017). Transportation to work 2016. https://​censusreporter.​org/​profiles/​40000US80389-seattle-wa-urbanized-area/​. Accessed 10 June 2018

City: Census Reporter (2017). Transportation to work 2016. https://​censusreporter.​org/​profiles/​16000US5363000-seattle-wa/​. Accessed 10 June 2018

^bSources Metro area: Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (2018). Déplacements domicile-travail dans le Grand Montréal: Faible progression du transport durable depuis 2001. Perspective Grand Montréal. Bulletin de l’Observatoire du Grand Montréal. http://​cmm.​qc.​ca/​fileadmin/​user_​upload/​periodique/​35_​Perspective.​pdf. Accessed 10 June 2018

Agglomeration: Ville de Montréal (2018). Mode de transport utilisé pour se rendre au travail, agglomération de Montréal, 2016. Montréal en statistiques. http://​ville.​montreal.​qc.​ca/​portal/​page?​_​pageid=​6897,67889698&​_​dad=​portal&​_​schema=​PORTAL. Accessed 10 June 2018

^cSource ICLEI (2016). Curitiba, Brazil. City Statistics. EcoMobility. https://​ecomobility.​org/​alliance/​alliance-cities/​curitiba-brasil-2/​. Accessed 10 June 2018

In order to assess how these cities have achieved a more sustainable transportation system, we have focused in this book on which policies they have pursued and, more specifically, which policy instruments they have used to implement them. Since it appears that successful cities use a wide variety of instruments, presumably at different stages, to achieve the quite complex goal of sustainable urban transportation , we were interested in what were these instruments and how were they combined to achieve their success. Although different expressions are utilized, such as “policy tools” or “regulation”, in its widest sense, policy instruments refer to the means available to governments to influence or coerce business and citizens in a direction which it finds desirable (for closely resembling definitions, see Howlett 1991, 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Context of Sustainable Urban Transport
• 3. Three Cities of the Americas: Policies and Instruments in Seattle, Montreal, and Curitiba
• 4. Conclusion on the Data
• 5. Looking to the Future
• Back Matter