Urban transport and sustainability: squaring the circle?

The 10 million residents in Portugal are distributed asymmetrically throughout the national territory, concentrating in urban areas and becoming increasingly scarce in rural areas. Two cities alone, Lisbon (the capital) and Oporto, concentrate around 40% of the population and well over half of national production.

The strong concentration of populations in urban areas creates increased problems in accessibility and mobility, translated in loss of time, accidents, emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases and, as a consequence, loss of quality of life.

Public policies for the main metropolitan areas have long privileged an increase in the supply of public transport as a way to counter the sharp increase in ownership and use of individual transport.

Therefore, in the Oporto Metropolitan Area, a Light Metropolitan System was created with a network currently extending for approximately 60km and due to reach 101.6km by 2018. In 2009, demand was over 261 million passengers/km, a 0.7% increase over the preceding year.

In the case of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (with a population in 2008 of 2.819 million inhabitants), the city has an underground subway system with a network of approximately 50km, which carried 835.4 passengers/km in 2008. There is also a Light Metropolitan System in the south bank of the Tagus River. The company, Transtejo, offers a transport service by ship across the river.

In addition to these systems, there are a number of road transport operators, including two state-owned companies (Carris in Lisbon and STCP in Oporto). However, despite the financial effort in building these transport systems, the downward trend in the number of passengers, favouring individual transport, has not been averted.

To change modal distribution towards sustainable mobility is an enormous challenge, requiring first of all a change in attitude by citizens, who must realise that mobility as practiced nowadays cannot subsist much longer.

But this change in attitude can’t involve solely, or mainly, indoctrination efforts and the creation of moral imperatives regarding the use and abuse of individual transport. We must rather prepare the City for a more sustainable mobility, and in doing so the land use and zoning policies are determining. High occupation density and less specialised use of land must be favoured in order to develop a ‘neighbourhood city’ requiring less motorised trips. This requires strong changes in paradigm and praxis of local authorities, which deal more closely with zoning and land use management instruments.

It involves the establishment of conditions for soft modes to develop safely.

It also involves the role that supramunicipal entities regulating the transport systems must carry out in designing networks, executing public service concession contracts, mobilising financial resources into total coverage of the social cost imposed by the community and auditing the performance of said concession contracts.

It involves a strong increase in citizen participation in decision-making processes on this subject.

But it also very much involves a more intensive use of results from scientific research and of the amazing conquers of information and communication technologies, which is far from being exhausted.

And because this has enormous potential, we must link scientific and technological research to the creative imagination that scientists must have, an imagination which is a renewable resource. Today, these tech – nologies allow us to draft solutions which, in breaking conventional rules of the transport sector such as fixed lines and schedules, allow for transport alternatives which are closer to people’s actual needs.

The Portuguese Government has been developing a number of actions which, in time, should translate into a more rational transport system and an urban mobility model more amenable to citizens’ quality of life. Metropolitan Transport Authorities have been set up in the two main cities and are taking the first steps in their mission, designing networks and preparing the procedures for the award of public service concessions. An existing but not yet generalised contactless ticketing system is currently being expanded to all the Lisbon region operators. At the same time we are studying ways to simplify tariff systems, which are currently too complex for non-frequent users of public transport. Different operators have been offering information systems to the public which make their offered transport system more intelligible.

On a final note, it should be stressed that the current organisation of the transport system relies strongly on the specific vocations of each mode, as well as their articulation and complementarities. Instead of a blind growth in supply focusing on expanding coverage for each and every mode, we are currently seeking to benefit from the characteristics of each mode and from the synergies made possible by good articulation between them.