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With rapid growth in the number of personal motor vehicles, Indian cities have been facing increasing congestion and worsening air quality. Yet until early 2005 little attention was paid to this problem, and remedial measures were focused largely on overpasses and new roadway capacity. Only Delhi, Calcutta, and Chennai had built functioning metro rail systems. However, by the second half of 2006, barely a year and a half later, the situation changed considerably, and public transport became the focus of attention in most large and medium-sized cities. This paper looks at the national initiatives that helped bring about those changes. The adoption of a national urban transport policy along with the launching of a national urban renewal mission with a sizable commitment of funds helped focus attention on improving public transportation. These were supplemented by a series of well-conceived and -planned initiatives, again led by the national government, to generate more widespread awareness of urban mobility problems and how they could be successfully addressed. The results were visible in a mere 18 months, by which time several cities had already formulated plans for significantly improved public transport and the first incremental phase of what will be India's first bus rapid transit system had become operational.

Abstract Electric mobility is a trending topic around the world, and many countries are supporting electric vehicle technologies to reduce environmental impacts from transportation such as greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution in cities. While such environmental impacts are widely studied in the literature, there is not much emphasis on a comprehensive sustainability assessment of these vehicle technologies, encompassing the three pillars of sustainability as the environment, society, and economy. In this study, we presented a novel comprehensive life cycle sustainability assessment for four different support utility electric vehicle technologies, including hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and full battery electric vehicles. A hybrid multi-regional input-output based life cycle sustainability assessment model is developed to quantify fourteen sustainability indicators representing the three pillars of sustainability. As a case study, we studied the impacts for Qatar, a country where 100% of electricity generation is from natural gas and have a very unique supply-chain, mainly due to a wide range of exported products and services. The analysis results showed that all-electric vehicle types have significant potential to lower global warming potential, air pollution, and photochemical oxidant formation. A great majority (above 90%) of the emissions occurs within the region boundaries of Qatar. In the social indicators, internal combustion vehicles performed better than all other electric vehicles in terms of employment generation, compensation of employees, and taxes. The results highlighted that adoption of electric vehicle alternatives doesn't favor macro-economic indicators and they have slightly less for a life-cycle cost. The proposed assessment methodology can be useful for a comprehensive regionalized life cycle sustainability assessment of alternative vehicle technologies and developing regionalized sustainable transportation policies worldwide.

Abstract Various vulnerability assessment studies have revealed the effect of climate change and related extreme weather events on the small-scale fisheries households of coastal regions. However, hardly any study assesses the economic vulnerability of the poorest coastal households to extreme climatic events. The present study attempts to fill this gap by examining the economic vulnerability of deprived coastal households through a vulnerability assessment framework developed based on the IPCC approved strategy. A gender dimension is also brought to this study by assessing the households based on the household headship. A total of 120 male headed households and 30 female headed households from two coastal taluks of Thrissur district in Kerala, the Southwestern state of India, was selected for analysis. Female headed households emerged to be the most vulnerable group in all the three aspects considered – exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The study put forward suggestions to reduce the risks and improve the economic characteristics of poorest sections of the coastal households through women empowerment and policy intervention.

For many of the poorest people in the world, water transport is the only means of mobility and access to basic services. Improvements in rural water transport (RWT) technologies, infrastructure, and services can help eliminate poverty and reduce isolation. Yet in a transport climate dominated by motorized vehicles and roads, traditional waterways have been neglected and deprioritized. The importance of RWT in the lives of the rural poor is explored by examining the results of the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development's Waterways and Livelihoods networked research project. Why RWT has become a marginalized issue is discussed. A new networking and information resource that promotes the integration of RWT through improved policy and practice both within the transport sector and in the wider development community is introduced. The lack of integration of RWT in mainstream transport and development planning is manifest in the deterioration of traditional waterways and infrastructure and in conflicts between waterway use and land transport (or other) interventions. The consequences of this lack of integration are lost opportunities for poor people to improve their livelihoods and lost potential to develop ecologically and financially sustainable transport technologies. Why has RWT been neglected? The Waterways and Livelihoods research identified a lack of positive visibility as the prevailing factor, including poor perceptions of RWT as outmoded and unsafe, a dearth of reliable statistical information on the sector, and an "unfair playing field" on which RWT suffers in comparison with other transport options.

This paper presents long-term scenarios on the development of urban passenger mobility and related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050 in global cities that have populations greater than 300,000 on the basis of the International Transport Forum’s new global urban passenger transport model. Results from the policy scenarios analysis show that in the baseline scenario total motorized mobility and related CO2 emissions in cities will grow by 94% and 27% in 2050 compared with 2015. The share of private cars will continue to increase in developing regions while slightly decreasing in developed economies. Policy measures exist to fulfill mobility demand while reducing the carbon intensity of travel. Technology contributes the most to the CO2 mitigation in the most transit-oriented scenarios. Behavioral policies such as fuel tax, lower transit fares, and controlled urban sprawl can bring the additional mitigation efforts required to make cities sustainable and are essential to combat congestion and health issues.

Trends in urban transportation and environment are reviewed, with a focus on developing countries. “Sustainable transportation” is defined to include economic and environmental sustainability as well as equity as key criteria. Governance sustainability is also important if policies and technologies are to reduce the main externalities of urban transport. It is important to relate emissions to traffic, modal share, fuel use, and fuel characteristics; transport policies must confront all of these components if emissions are to be reduced significantly. Urban areas in developing countries have become the most polluted and congested cities in the world because of barriers to serious transport sector reform addressing these ills. However, some policies and technologies are permitting regions in Latin America and Asia to begin to change. Strong actions by cities, backed by national government formulation of equipment and fuel standards and supported by private-sector initiatives, are all needed— together with political will—to reverse the unsustainable trends in urban transport in the largest urban areas today.

AbstractSmall Island States present features, such as compact road networks, low commuter distances, and often large tourism service sectors, that could make the adoption of electric vehicles for transportation which is an attractive way to reduce their costly dependence on imported fossil fuel and their greenhouse gas emissions. Through the transition theory lens, we review the national policy measures and broad clean transportation targets that small island countries are implementing to encourage electric mobility deployment. From information compiled for 18 small island countries, we find a growing trend in electric vehicle and infrastructure development incentives among broader clean transportation transformation policies and nationally determined contribution targets; and large country‐to‐country variations in enabling conditions to smoothen EV transition. Small island countries are not uniform but instead are very dispersed across the transition S‐curve. The review, therefore, finds that the mobility transition requires island‐specific approaches and solutions that will accentuate critical policy and management elements for fostering transitions.This article is categorized under: Policy and Economics > Energy Transitions Sustainable Development > Sustainable Development Goals

Road accidents cause more deaths than homicides in Latin America, nevertheless it is not highlighted as a major concern by media and society. World Health Organization put this issue in high priority by releasing the Decade of Action in Road Safety that establishes five pillars to guide national road safety plans and activities. This paper addresses the drawbacks in the implementation of these actions in Latin American countries and its implications to achieve a sustainable development. The main concerns are: lack of empowerment of the road safety management organisations; lower vehicular standards; corruption related to the enforcement of traffic safety laws to and to the construction of safer roads; absence of safety vehicular inspections; vehicle fleet increase, decrease of public transportation demand; and the absence of a safety culture. Without facing these problems, sustainable development in Latin America will be impaired, once road safety is a fundamental link to achieve sustainability.

The Middle Eastern region is well-known for its flourishing tourism industry as the aviation sector contributes over US$213 billion to the regional GDP while air transport-related activities account for over 3.3 million jobs. Howbeit, the environmental impacts of this flourishing industry remain questionable. Hence, this study examines the tourism-emissions nexus in the Middle Eastern region from the perspective of air transportation while underscoring the multifaceted roles of major indicators like globalization, income, and energy use in the region. The empirical analysis of data spanning from 1975 to 2018 was conducted with advanced panel data analytical approach using the CS-ARDL technique. The sample selection was guided by available statistics on international tourist arrivals from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 2020), with a focus on the case of the five leading travel destinations in the region including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Oman, and Qatar. The robustness of the evaluated outputs was checked after which result-based policy suggestions were enunciated for authorities and other regional stakeholders. The analysis indicated that air transportation although boosting tourism has constituted significant detrimental environmental impacts on the reviewed destinations with an estimated long-run elasticity of ∼1.03. Additionally, while the trio of globalization, energy utilization, and income expansion exacerbate environmental degradation, the lowest carbon-triggering magnitude was observed from the regional income expansion. Thus, while the aviation sector facilitates the growing quest to diversify from a primary sector-based economy (mainly resources exploitation) to other prospective service industries like tourism, the study posits the need for authorities to put measures in place to address the environmental side effect of air transportation.