In this book, the authors examine the urban transport crisis from an international, comparative perspective. Throughout the industrialised world, car ownership and use have grown rapidly over the past few decades. In contrast, public transport use has either fallen or stagnated, so that urban transport has become ever more car oriented. Those trends have caused increasingly severe social, economic and environmental problems. While providing more flexibility, comfort and door-to-door speed for the individual traveller, the automobile causes far more severe external impacts than public transport. Thus, increased car ownership and use are directly related to increased pollution and congestion in European and North American cities. This book is divided into three main parts: the introduction and overview (Chapters 1 and 2); in-depth case studies of eight countries; Chapters 3 to 10); and the summary, comparative evaluation and policy recommendations (Chapter 11). Chapter 2 provides an overview of urban transport in Europe and North America, including comparisons of trends in car ownership, travel behaviour, road supply, public transport services and urban land use patterns. A range of transport problems is discussed. Chapters 3- 10 constitute the bulk of the book. Those chapters provide an in-depth analysis of the urban transport situation in each of eight countries (or groups of countries): Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, Eastern Europe, Canada, USA. The third section (Chapter 11) of the book summarises the differences among countries and trends over time in urban transport. Most of the final chapter, however, is devoted to evaluating the effectiveness of alternative policies for dealing with urban transport problems. For that evaluation, we draw in particular on the analysis in the eight case studies of individual countries, but the authors also examine evidence from other countries and from other sources in the literature. The emphasis here is on what countries can learn from each other's experiences with urban transport problems and policies. The chapter concludes with a set of policy recommendations to improve transport policies, and a discussion of likely future developments in urban transport. (Author/publisher)
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