Connections
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Connections is a weekly series of knowledge notes from the World Bank Group’s Transport & Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Global Practice. It covers projects, experiences, and front-line developments.
Items in this collection
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Publication
Enhancing Road Resilience in Pacific Island Countries: World Bank Assisting Adaptation to Climate Change
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)Pacific island countries are experiencing higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather that is increasingly frequent and intense. The resulting damage has likewise been extreme. Between 2012 and 2015, for example, losses from three cyclones ranged from 11 percent to 64 percent of GDP in Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu. In many of these countries, primary roads and critical infrastructure are adjacent to the coast, and the majority of the population lives within 1 kilometer of the sea. Expected climate change effects will place coastal assets and communities at a higher level of risk. Governments are well aware of these challenges. Today, more than one-fourth of the World Bank’s transport commitments support mitigation and adaptation to climate change (a share that is growing), and its work with Pacific island countries is one of the ways it is responding to the rising demand for climate action. The demand from Pacific island countries in recent years has focused on road resilience, and early lessons will provide a strong basis for further progress. -
Publication
Advances and Challenges in 'Intelligent Transportation': The Evolution of ICT to Address Transport Challenges in Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11)Transport efficiency and safety in the advanced economies have long benefited from information and communication technology (ICT). However, these ICT applications have typically been high-cost, customized infrastructure systems. Now the era of the Internet, digital mobile communication, and ‘big data’ analysis has created a new global potential for less costly and more powerful ‘intelligent transport systems’ (ITS). The World Bank is supporting client transport agencies in deploying these new tools, including cloud-based services, open data standards, and smartphone applications, to more efficiently manage transportation assets and improve road safety. In the process, such projects have also demonstrated improvements in the traveler’s experience and the attractiveness of public transit. Moreover, the greater potential of the new technologies to reduce congestion and travel times means that the new era has also strengthened the potential of ITS to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, realizing the potential of ITS in developing countries depends on improvements in assessment practices to find what works best and in the data capabilities of domestic institutions. Significant improvements in these areas are critical to the success of ITS. -
Publication
Mobility for All: Getting the Right Urban Indicator
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11)Most urban transport projects have focused on improving the ability of citizens to move freely and swiftly about the city. Typically, that ability has been measured by the share of the population living within, say, 0.5 kilometer of a transit stop, or the maximum travel distance per unit of time, or the amount of transportation infrastructure in a city. Using such ‘proximity’ measures to monitor urban mobility has led to congested highway networks and public transit systems that have failed to bring jobs and services within the practical reach of residents, especially the poor. These proximity-based measures represent indirect attempts to capture the real objective of transit systems: the accessibility of opportunities. New technologies and richer databases now make accessibility, the number of jobs, health facilities, schools, and other essential services that are available without a car in, say, 30–75 minutes, a practical criterion for judging the state of mobility and for designing ways to improve it. Using the accessibility criterion will be critical to achieving SDG 11, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.’ -
Publication
Creating Pro-Poor Transport: Connecting the Dots - Transport, Growth, and Poverty Reduction
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)Transport plays a crucial role in connecting people to goods and services and fostering sustainable development. The literature links improved transport infrastructure to economic growth and poverty reduction through five key mechanisms: (1) reducing transport and production costs, (2) creating jobs, (3) expanding productive capacity, (4) improving access to markets and basic services like health and education, and (5) reducing prices of final goods and services. These benefits depend on supportive conditions in other sectors, such as access to credit, functioning land markets, low trade barriers, and so on. Therefore, any assessment of potential gains from transport infrastructure and services should also account for the interaction with complementary markets. However, the analysis of such interactions, assessing how and when transport infrastructure can help reduce poverty and income inequality, is largely missing from the literature, leaving significant knowledge gaps across the spectrum of transportation settings. This note highlights existing findings and some limitations in the literature on three basic types of transport infrastructure: large projects such as regional or national highways and railroads; rural transport; and transport in urban areas. -
Publication
Lima Urban Transport: On the Way to Transformation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)The implementation of metro line 2, now under way, will provide a modern, 35 kilometer mass transit axis linking major population and job centers in Lima, the capital of Peru, with Callao to the west, the country’s chief seaport and international airport. Integrated with the Lima-Callao region’s existing public transport network, line 2 will create a major corridor that will improve the accessibility of jobs, services, and markets for 2.3 million people and provide a backbone for more efficient urban development. Beyond the investment loan, this co-financed project is an outgrowth of a long term metropolitan transport strategy and multifaceted engagement that is aligned with the World Bank’s goals of reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity through sustainable development. It will give a boost to the competitiveness of the entire Lima-Callao Metropolitan Region, which has a population of more than 9 million and constitutes more than one-third of the national economy. -
Publication
Envisioning the Transport We Need: Goals of the UN High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport
( 2015-09)The world faces two urgent challenges: eradicating poverty through economic development, and tackling climate change. Sustainable transport is crucial to both. In August 2014, the UN Secretary-General established a High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable Transport to make policy recommendations that ‘promote accelerated implementation of sustainable transport.’ The World Bank is a member of the technical working group supporting the advisory group, which sees sustainable transport as a prerequisite for all countries to attain competitiveness, inclusive and equitable growth, balanced social and spatial development, and energy and food security. And it is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in support of the 2°C Scenario. Progress can be accelerated if all heed the calls for action on sustainable transport and development that exist today in a wide range of international agreements, conventions, and declarations. -
Publication
Impact Evaluation to Inform and Transform Investments in Transport and ICT
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-06)A new World Bank initiative, ‘Impact Evaluation (IE) - connect for impact,’ aims to radically transform and better inform the way that transport and information and communications technology (ICT) projects are designed and implemented. Although multilateral lending to this key strategic sector comprises 29 percent of all global assistance, only 0.4 percent of impact evaluations have had transport as a subject. This initiative aims to fill the gap and bring high quality and valuable feedback to projects, improving design, enabling mid-course corrections, and informing ex-post evaluations. For the first time, this initiative will offer a systematic sector approach to generating concrete evidence of what works, what does not, where, when and why. It will greatly increase the impact and value add of investments in transport and ICT projects, which is especially important given global trends toward increasing urbanization, with 70 percent of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050. -
Publication
More Climate Finance for Sustainable Transport
( 2015-05)Actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to stabilize warming at 2 degree Celsius, as agreed by the international community in 2009, will fall short if they do not include the transport sector. Transport is responsible for around 23 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and emissions are expected to rise without further action to curb emission growth and invest in low carbon transport modes. Investment needs are estimated at around $3 trillion to increase the sustainability of existing and new transport systems and to mitigate climate change over the 2015-35 periods. This is in addition to existing annual investments estimated at $1-2 trillion. The actions taken today to send the right policy signals, and establish the enabling institutions and regulations to attract the necessary private finance will be critical to support this transformation. Significant investment opportunities exist in public transport systems, vehicle efficiency improvement, and reducing the need for travel through demand management, regional development policies, and land use planning. As the international community embarks on the road towards CoP 21 in Paris, there is a case to be made for more climate finance flowing towards transport. -
Publication
Boosting Mass Transit through Entrepreneurship: Going beyond Subsidies to Reduce the Public Transport Funding Gap
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-02)Most of the world’s urban mass transit systems cannot cover operating costs, let alone capital expenses, through farebox revenues. On average, 25 percent of metro operating expenditures are not funded by farebox income. With limited public subsidies, as well as obstacles to raising fares and political sensitivities to road user taxes, metro systems have been increasingly pursuing income from commercial activities connected with their operations. Metro systems earn commercial income, such as from advertising, naming rights, and especially real estate activities, are making inroads in their operating deficits. Commercial revenue in some systems is nearing 20 percent of fare revenue. Although reforms of transit financing structures remain high on the policy agenda, a review of ancillary income streams of metro systems around the world shows that a more entrepreneurial approach to tapping their commercial potential can help them narrow their funding gap.