Mobility and Transport Connectivity
19 items available
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Mobility and Transport Connectivity is a series produced by the Transport Global Practice of the World Bank. The works in this series gather evidence and promote innovation and good practices relating to the development challenges addressed in transport operations and analytical and advisory services.
Items in this collection
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Publication
The Economics of Electric Vehicles for Passenger Transportation
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-10-31)Electric mobility has garnered growing interest and significant momentum across several major global markets, often motivated by transport sector decarbonization. Together, Europe, China, and the United States account for more than 90 percent of the world’s electric vehicle fleet. For many OECD countries, electric mobility is seen primarily as a lever for transport sector decarbonization, given that many of the other relevant policy options have already been exhausted. This report finds that electric mobility is also increasingly relevant for low- and middle-income countries. As of today, electric mobility for passengers is a comparative rarity across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In some of the LMIC leading markets, such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia, electric vehicles account for less than 0.5 percent of total sales. There are signs that this situation is changing. India, Chile, and Brazil are leading the way in electrifying their bus fleets in their largest cities by introducing innovative financing practices and improved procurement practices. Battery swapping schemes are taking off in Asian and East African countries to lower the upfront cost of two-and three-wheelers. Original modeling for this report suggests that established global policy targets, such as 30 percent of new passenger vehicles to be electric by 2030, will make economic sense for many LMICs under a wide range of possible scenarios. -
Publication
Competing with Logistics Clusters: Vignettes from the International Experience
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022-05)Logistics clusters boost logistics efficiency. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brought about a common global threat of historic proportions and yielded critical lessons as to the importance of supply chain resilience-from essential medical supplies to consumer goods in responding to such a challenge. Today the world increasingly recognizes the value of adaptive infrastructure and service delivery platforms, often collaborative in nature, to face the “certainty of uncertain situations” at all levels of the value chain. Logistics clusters are at the core of positioning transportation and logistics as a driver of productivity gains, environmental sustainability, resilience, and economic growth. This report contributes to informing decision making, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to deploy logistics clusters to underpin international and domestic commerce, employment growth, and investment. It provides a practical, action-oriented source of examples relying on the case study approach. Particularly important is the report’s role as a tool to inform decision making to position logistics not as a source of environmental externalities to avoid, but as an indispensable contributor to the decarbonization and resilience plans increasingly adopted in the context of the Paris Agreement or as a matter of basic economic development. The structure of the report is as follows: An opening chapter presents definitional and conceptual issues related to logistics clusters. The report will then present, in turn, the case studies of the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Korea. Lessons will be drawn from these cases in separate chapters. Lastly, the report will propose a list of policy questions, derived from the World Bank’s cross-country experience, and attempt to answer them based on the evidence presented in the preceding chapters. -
Publication
Railways in Developing Countries: A Global Review
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-04-19)As a green mode of transportation, railways have an important role to play in decarbonizing transport through shifting transport from more polluting modes of transport such as road and air. Railways can enable economic growth, which in turn generates increasing transport demand, while keeping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions low. However, in many parts of the world, railways have lost traffic and market share to air and road transport modes. As countries seek to reduce their GHG emissions, while still delivering on economic growth, many are rethinking the role of rail. Many developing countries have existing railway networks, which will provide the starting point for efforts to increase rail in the transport mix. This report provides a basic stocktaking of those railways, explaining the industry structure and the current situation. Basic data on network size; volume; passenger fares and freight tariffs; labor productivity; network density; and perceived service quality assets, traffic, pricing and staffing have been compiled into the Developing Country Rail Database, which could be useful for analysis and comparisons across regions. The data have been collected from various public sources—annual railway or regulator reports and/or national statistical annuals. Most data are for 2018. The report covers railways providing services to the general public in 77 countries. Not included are the railways in most higher income countries (North America, Europe, Australasia, and northeast Asia), private mining railways and China, whose railway network has been covered in numerous other reports. The information shared in this report is presented in seven regional summaries, which group together railways sharing a common geographic area and other characteristics: South America; Sub-Saharan Africa; South Asia; Southeast Asia; the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Mongolia; and the Middle East. These summaries include basic data on institutional arrangements. -
Publication
Saving Lives Through Private Investment in Road Safety: Knowledge Report - 2022
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-22)The World Bank estimates a significant funding gap in road safety of 260 billion to achieve SDG 3.6 and 11.2 in the next ten years, and recognizes that this gap cannot be closed through public funding alone and thus mobilization of private capital is required. The impacts of road traffic crashes reach far into the economy and can cost L/MICs as much as 6% of their GDP. The costs of a road traffic crash do not end at the roadside; they create ripple effects throughout the wider economy. Loss of income, property damage, insurance premiums, loss of taxes, and burdens on the health sector are just some of the far-reaching costs associated with road traffic crashes. Road traffic crashes can cost countries as much as 6 percent of their GDP and trap families in poverty as they lose income generating potential and focus on providing lifetime care. This report examines the potential for private capital mobilization to close this gap. The report investigates the market failure to appropriately account for the cost of road crashes, which prevents private capital from flowing to road safety investments. The growth of socially responsible investing and the sustainable finance market offers a new opportunity to address this market failure. The report proposes different business models and financing instruments to channel private investment into road safety projects. These investment structures consist of subnational, public-private partnerships (PPPs) and corporate investments that can leverage the growing sustainable finance market, including social and sustainability-linked financings (SLFs). The report also develops indicators that can be used to tie the cost of financing to the attainment of road safety targets, incentivizing borrowers to commit to road safety as part of SLFs. The report examines the enabling environment for structuring investable road safety projects in a sample of countries, looking at the barriers and opportunities, and proposing risks and mitigation strategies, like blended finance mechanisms and stable revenue sources, for long-term sustainability of road safety investments. -
Publication
The COVID-19 Pandemic and African Aviation: Policy Note
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-14)The COVID-19 pandemic is posing an existential threat to the air transport sector globally, including in Africa. Due to sustained and significant loss of revenue coupled with the presence of several fixed and quasi-fixed inputs in this sector, the survival of carriers is questionable in the short term. This could lead to bankruptcies of important African-based airlines resulting in severe loss of connectivity, especially in the intra-African markets. If history is any guide, within the current regulatory environment that restricts market access and the ownership and control of airlines, it could be a long time before another airline fills the void left by a defunct airline in Africa. This challenge is further compounded by the difficulty of accessing capital and the high cost of (re)training and attracting the highly skilled labor typically needed to run a viable airline. The objective of this policy note is to explore policy and operational strategies to build back a safe and competitive air transport sector in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis in Africa. It focuses on four broad areas: it provides a short status update on the impact of the pandemic; reviews pre-COVID-19 sector challenges from the supply, demand, and regulatory sides; tracks and analyzes government financial support and bailouts to airlines in the aftermath of the crisis globally; and identifies and recommends operational and policy responses to mitigate the impact of the crisis and put the aviation sector on a sustainable development path. -
Publication
Scaling Up Private Sector Participation in Road Asset Management in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-02-09)The purpose of this study is to evaluate non-traditional means to raise additional private financing for the upgrade and maintenance of developing countries’ road networks. To achieve this goal, it combines an in-depth review of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries’ road funds’ (RF) performance and road public private partnerships (PPPs) to evaluate the potential for RFs to fund road PPPs when specific conditions are met. This report presents to explore how, in few selected cases, SSA RFs can be reformed to substantially increase the amount of public and private monies flowing towards the maintenance and or upgrade of the core road networks of SSA countries. -
Publication
The Role of Rail in Decarbonizing Transport in Developing Countries
(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022)Railways support green development. Governments in developing countries seek to provide transport infrastructure and services to enable inclusive economic development. Transport decarbonization is critical for mitigating climate change through near-term actions and long-term transitions. Railways have an important role in reducing transport emissions, while also supporting economic development and increased mobility. Structured around the avoid–shift–improve framework, this report provides a systematic review of potential contributions that railways can make to development and climate goals. -
Publication
Motorization Management for Development: An Integrated Approach to Improving Vehicles for Sustainable Mobility
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022)Across the developing world, countries are experiencing rapid growth in urbanization and motorization. While high motorization rates potentially meant hat more people will be able to claim the benefits of improved accessibility to goods and services as a consequence of enhanced mobility, there are questions about the sustainability of this future. Will countries be able to build and maintain infrastructure to accommodate increasing numbers of vehicles? Will the increasing number of vehicles and their characteristics support attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Will they put in jeopardy countries’ ability to meet their climate commitments under their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)? From a development impact standpoint, the nature of a country’s motor vehicle stock and how it grows affects three key and tangible outcomes. First, the quality of the motor vehicle stock affects road safety outcomes—that is, the number of people killed or seriously injured in motor vehicle crashes. The characteristics of vehicles and their fitness or roadworthiness can affect fatality and serious injury outcomes. Second, the quality of the motor vehicle fleet affects air quality, particularly in cities. Motor vehicles are a key source of harmful air pollution, including carbon monoxide (CO), fine particulates (PM2.5), sulfur oxides (SOx), and ozone precursors (oxides of nitrogen and various hydrocarbons), and the amount of these pollutants they emit is directly related to how the vehicle was built and how well it is maintained. Finally, the profile of the vehicle fleet—what is the size and weight of vehicles in the fleet, how big are their engines, what kind of power control technology do they use, and how did their manufacturers engineer the technology of the vehicle to balance power with efficiency—affects the (fossil) fuel consumption of the vehicle stock as a whole, and, consequently, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions profile of the road transport sector. This report presents the World Bank’s Motorization Management (MM) framework, which is intended to support client countries in the development of policies and measures aimed at managing vehicle stocks in a proactive, phased, and systematic manner to make them safer, cleaner, and more fuel efficient. The MM framework reflects a series of policy considerations and programs that can be implemented to improve the quality of fuels and vehicles in a country’s stock. -
Publication
Is a Mile for One a Mile for All?: A Knowledge Synthesis Report on Gender and Mobility (2000–20)
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022)The broad objectives of this study were to identify the following: (1) mobility differences globally between women and men (and by non-binary individuals, more broadly, where possible). This objective includes identifying and explaining heterogeneity in mobility needs and patterns in developed and developing countries (and intersectionality across gender, age, geographic location, ethnicity, disability, class and income, sexual identity, where possible), and documenting how these dimensions influence mobility choices and needs; (2) outcomes for women and men (and intersectionality across other gender identity, socioeconomic and demographic criteria, where possible) of mobility barriers and opportunities to access education, employment, health, social services, and leisure and recreation services. This objective includes identifying the differing effects and outcomes for women and men (and intersectionality across other gender identity, socioeconomic and demographic criteria, where possible) of transport investments and innovations; (3) policy lessons and future research needs for optimizing access to transport for women and other transport-disadvantaged groups. -
Publication
Guidelines for Conducting Road Safety Data Reviews
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022)In many countries around the world, deficiencies in data or data quality impair evidence-based road safety policy making. While many countries collect road safety data, the collection is not necessarily comprehensive. Further, many countries can be unaware of data gaps in their system, which prevents them from soundly analyzing their road safety problems. Therefore, road safety data definitions and collection methods must converge into standard international criteria, thus allowing for comparisons in space - across countries - and in time. This is the raison d’etre of regional road safety observatories, which have been developed, for example, in Latin America (OISEVI), Africa (ARSO), and Asia-Pacific (APRSO). They present an opportunity for joint regional efforts to improve, in a harmonized way, road safety data collection and analysis. Regional road safety observatories promote the adoption of a common set of road safety indicators based on common definitions and serve as an avenue to assist countries in improving the management of their crash data systems.