Urban mobility worldwide—how does it look today?

Abstract

When Traffic in Towns 1 was published in 1963, the UK motor-vehicle fleet was probably as large a proportion of the world fleet as it has ever been or has been since. While motorisation had proceeded apace in North America in the 1930s, it had not really taken off elsewhere. The UK was one of the first countries outside the US to see a rapid burgeoning in motor-vehicle ownership after the Second World War, with the number of cars growing by 280% and road traffic by 190% between 1938 and 1963. In 1963, the UK road-vehicle fleet comprised almost 7% of the world total. Today it is a little over 4%. It is not surprising, therefore, that we saw the urban traffic-congestion problem as something that was characteristically British. Today, urban traffic-congestion from motor vehicles is to be found in many countries and, severe as our problems can be, it is in cities such as Bangkok, Mexico City, Cairo and Delhi where the largest incidences of urban traffic-congestion are to be found. This paper looks at urban travel in different parts of the world to see how the problems of actual and incipient mass-motorisation considered in Traffic in Towns 1 are manifesting themselves. It leans heavily on the work done in compiling the report Mobility 2001: World Mobility at the End of the Twentieth Century and its Sustainability 2 for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, produced by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (to which the author was the senior transport consultant) and Charles River Associates, but the arguments and conclusions here are the responsibility of the author alone.