The good, the bad and the ugly in urban transport: Comparing global cities for dependence on the automobile

Abstract

© Janette Hartz-Karp and Dora Marinova 2017. All rights reserved. Passenger transport is a vexed problem in cities across the globe, whether in highly auto-dependent regions in the USA or Australia, more transit-oriented cities in Europe, or in Latin America, China, India and Africa with their giant, rapidly motorizing and fast-growing megacities. The work described in this chapter presents a global research enterprise, which had its origins in the late 1970s and is still ongoing today, to properly enumerate key data that describe the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of urban passenger transportation in over 100 cities worldwide. By collecting reliable and hard-to-get data, comparative statistics for each city are calculate, e.g. per capita car use, urban density and many more. This has amassed a significant legacy of academic publications and has been used globally to help develop better cities. The chapter describes the history of this research, its methodology and examples of some output.