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Although delivery of goods is vitally important for residents and industries in urban areas, the presence and operations of goods transport vehicles in urban areas are often regarded more as a nuisance than an essential service. Relatively little has been done by many governments to facilitate the essential flows of goods in urban areas and to reduce the adverse impacts of urban goods transport on the communities being served. This has resulted in increasing problems associated with goods delivery including competition with passenger transport for access to road infrastructure and space for parking/delivery facilities. How should OECD countries deal with the difficult challenges they face in this area?

This report analyses measures taken in many cities in the OECD area and provides recommendations for dealing with these challenges.

Purpose – This chapter explores the functions of institutional setting, technical requirements and local city characteristics as they affect the implementation of sustainable urban travel policies in China under the pressure of fast motorization and the constraints of energy and resource limitations.

Methodology – We reviewed the documents related to sustainable urban transport vision in China from central government and compared the motorization and urban transport policy at local city level in relation to social equity, urban transport finance, as well as the challenge of an ageing society.

Findings – The concept of sustainable development had been widely talked about in China but has not yet been effectively translated into actions in urban transport. There is a need to strengthen the synchronization of central government and local government strategies on sustainable transport in order to achieve less car-dependent cities.

Research limitations/implications – We need more research to understand the specific characteristics of the Chinese urban transport system and the constraints on the implementation of sustainable transport policy at a local level.

Practical and social implications – The achievement of a higher share of walking and cycling will greatly improve sustainable urban mobility, in terms of social equity, quality of urban life and also fossil energy consumption.

Originality – Current policy documents and implementation practice were analysed to provide the reader with a deep understanding of urban transport policy in China.

This chapter presents a critical examination of the interaction between concepts such as equity and accessibility in a framework of sustainable and inclusive urban development. The analysis compiles a series of reflections that build on previous research that focusses on the role of transport as enabler of opportunities for material and social capital, healthcare and leisure, which contribute to human development and well-being. The research discusses accessibility metrics for mandatory and non-mandatory travel in the context of current global agendas for social and development policies. It also introduces methodological reflections in relation to the analysis of accessibility indices from an equity perspective highlighting the role of equity metrics such as the Palma ratio and Lorenz curves. The authors link accessibility and urban development seeking to inform current approaches for policy development and assessment in a context of high manifested inequity. The research is set in the context of the Bogotá Metropolitan Region, a paradigmatic case of transport development and policy in the Global South. The findings seek to contribute to present transport policy and practice, providing relevant insights to support actions that redistribute accessibility to opportunities and questioning some of the paradigms of mainstream transport planning in cities like Bogotá, suggesting a more relevant role of transport policy as a potential engine of equity and social development.

The smart city paradigm has evolved from a perspective focused on technological infrastructures to an approach in which the effects of the technological apparatus improve the quality of life of people, urban resilience, urban sustainability, and health, by introducing the concept of smart and sustainable city 3.0. In this chapter, the authors evaluate mobility as a key aspect of improving the environmental, social, and economic well-being of communities under the central concept of smart and sustainable city 3.0. To this end, the authors underline the link between mobility, the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP), and environmental health. Then, the authors outline (i) the mobility requirements to be met from a smart perspective on environmental health and how (ii) the SUMPs can be considered as the basic tool for connecting smartness with mobility and environmental health. Finally, the results obtained will be discussed, and future directions of this research will be illustrated.

The Algerian transport sector has undergone profound changes in recent decades with its privatization. Transport sector liberalization has achieved its primary objectives aimed at increasing public transport supply, but it has been accompanied by travel conditions deterioration because of public regulation insufficiency. For this, the Algerian State has put regulatory and institutional mechanisms to improve urban transport service quality. These mechanisms directly impose on operators and managers of transport means reception stations to meet the expectations of road users. The purpose of this study is to draw a portrait of the service quality of the Algerian urban transport. For this, a fieldwork was carried out in Batna city to know the degree of satisfaction of urban transport users toward the service offered.

In this work, the authors used questionnaires as a means of data collection. The study sample is composed of 102 users of the line. The questionnaire deals with personal data (age, sex, level of education, family and professional data), data on the nature of travel between the city of Batna and Tazoult (reasons for travel, travel time and the number of trips undertaken) and measure of user satisfaction on the Tazoult–Batna line according to the criteria of service offer, accessibility, information, duration, attention to the customer, comfort, security and environmental impact. In this work, participatory observation was also used to give a better understanding on how the urban network operates in the city. To this end, an observation grid with key questions has been prepared. It is concentrated on three axes: the actual organization of private operators providing urban bus transport, the state of buses, stations and stopping points and the practice of control by the services concerned. For this, trips were made on all urban lines during the study period. Discussions were conducted with some private operators to find out their positions and their roles in the operation of urban bus transport.

The results of this work show that satisfaction levels were average for transport supply, accessibility, duration, attention paid to customer, comfort and safety; however, they were low concerning information and environmental impact. The present work has made it possible to highlight the impacts of urban transport disorganization on the offered service. In addition, taking into account the expectations of users in terms of service quality should have positive impacts for the users themselves, for private and public operators and for urban transport managers.

This work presents a state of knowledge on the service quality in an urban environment and delivers information on the situation in Algeria without pretending to be exhaustive. However, the contribution of this study is not limited to the evaluation of the various criteria themselves, which are found in whole or in part in many studies devoted to this kind of evaluations. The real contribution of this work lies in highlighting the impacts of urban transport disorganization on the offered services quality. This disorganization is essentially characterized by a weakness or absence of an institutional framework and the multiplication of actors at different levels of intervention, which creates overlapping responsibilities or organizational gaps.

Purpose – The objective of this chapter is to draw the attention of policy makers in the fields of urban planning and transport in China to the importance of developing more balanced multi-modal transport systems and the corresponding land-use patterns to support transport systems, particularly walking and cycling in order to address the issues arising from the dense, highly mixed land-use pattern in many Chinese cities. This will help to reverse current planning practices which give car-oriented development top priority and less consideration of walking and cycling.

Methodology – Statistical methods have been applied to analyse modal split in some cities in Japan, Beijing and Shanghai using travel surveys, plus analysis of the experience of policies in various cities around the world, especially in terms of the relationship between the modal shares for public transport and car. Door-to-door travel times have been analysed for Shanghai to understand the potential of cycle or e-bicycle in a dense urban environment.

Findings – The change in travel modal split in Beijing in recent years suggests that simply encouraging public transport cannot control use of car. The data from Japan also shows that normal bus services cannot compete with the car, but it is clear that people will travel less by car if there is a high non-motorized share in the city. Because of the low density of the metro network, the door-to-door travel speed by metro is not as fast as is often imagined, due to the long off-metro time. The people who use metro are often not the people who live very close to metro stations, but some distance away, so improving the connection to the station by cycle or e-bicycle could greatly reduce the total travel time by metro.

Research limitations and implications – More analyses should be conducted in medium-size and small-size cities in China, where the local capacity is low and there is great potential to travel by walking and cycling, but only after clear guidance and policy instruments have been provided by higher authorities.

Practical and social implications – There is still a relatively high share of non-motorized travel in China. Many cities still have extensive cycle infrastructure established under the State Code of Urban Road Transport Planning issued in 1995. Encouraging non-motorized transport systems is not only possible, but also good for the environment, and contributes to travel efficiency and social inclusion.

Originality – This chapter is the summary of several original research studies using primary survey data, encouraging public transport in China. This is the first research to show the great potential of non-motorized mode for controlling car use and improving urban mobility in China. It is also the first chapter to point out the integration of multi-modal transport systems with the corresponding built environment in China.

This paper provides an extensive review of surveys and data-collection programmes focused on urban goods movement (UGM). Surveys investigating passenger urban travel have a decades-long tradition. The same is not true for UGM. The first specific UGM surveys appeared about 10 years ago in response to the rapid growth of car traffic, congestion, pollution and lack of space. Most of the time, these surveys have been carried out to resolve specific, local problems concerning traffic. Only a few of them have taken a global approach to urban logistics by including all logistics operators (own-account and carriers), all delivery vehicles (heavy and light vehicles), all deliveries and pickups (from express to full payload) and an entire metropolitan area and surroundings. Due to various European programmes, an inventory has been created to analyse urban goods data collection according to spatial level and methodology of capture. With this inventory, European urban freight indicators can be described, along with the units in which they are measured and their purposes. The relevance of urban goods transport surveys lies in their capacity to give decision-makers an account of urban freight transport functioning, ratios and data, so as to help in formulating planning, regulation and forecasting. It appears that focusing on the movement (delivery/pick-up), as the unit of analysis in establishment-driver surveys is the most efficient approach to describe the generation of vehicular flow in the city. This fact is revealed in the French UGM surveys, which take into account the complexity of urban logistics.

Since the 1990s, several policy instruments have been produced in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to improve accessibility to urban mobility systems, especially for people with disabilities. However, the city still faces important shortcomings in understanding the demands of the population with disabilities and in implementing an appropriate urban structure. The present work identifies mobility practices and demands for accessibility of this population based on a descriptive analysis of the city’s origin/destination survey (2012) and results of a focus group with representatives of the population with disabilities and public authorities. The analysis demonstrates that the demands of persons with reduced mobility are characterised first by a high level of immobility, comparing to people without disabilities, which has important consequences on access to urban goods, especially jobs and health and educational services. Second, mobility has a relevant role in producing forms of discrimination and exclusion. Third, in addition to the problems faced by the general population, people with reduced mobility also face greater challenges in using transport systems. Ultimately, this analysis points out that the main needs for people with disabilities are related to the problems of articulation between public places and transportation systems, both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of attitude and behaviour of service providers and other citizens.