Despite significant growth in urban population and motorization, great progress has been made in advancing the efficiency and effectiveness of urban transport in China in the past thirty years. Hundreds of millions of residents and jobs and tens of millions of personal vehicles have been added to already large cities, accompanied by among the highest growth rates foraverage household income in the World. Rising incomes and loosening restrictions on work and residential location have led to exponential growth rates in personal travel. On the supply side, there has been the greatest construction of urban transport infrastructure including expressways and newand expanded urban rail systems which the World has ever seen in an equivalent period of time. While progress has been unprecedented, much remains to be done in terms of investment and policy at all levels of government for urban transport sector. Remaining challenges include (i) lack of a consistently applied national urban transport policy; (ii) perverse incentives leading to market failure in urban transport; (iii) national governmentorganization and funding mechanisms that create local coordination obstacles; (iv) an emphasis on vehicular traffic rather than on the movement of people and goods, irrespective of mode; (v) uncoordinated, bottom-up advancement of single mode major investments instead of top-down integratedmulti-modal planning that also considers low-cost management and operations improvements in an alternatives analysis framework; and (vi) lack of adequate education and capacity building programs to prepare the qualified technical experts needed for coordinated scientific transport development. This Paper suggests an approach to improve the situation with focus on four areas: 1. Policies 2. Institutions 3. Procedures 4. Incentives The Paperargues that, in order to pursue the vision laid out by the PRC Central Government of a harmonious society, sustainable economic development, an improved environment and better managed energy resources, the PRC Central Government should establish a multi-agency national leading group/task force at the highest level to address these issues. International development institutions, such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, can provideassistance in this effort through a variety of mechanisms.
Samenvatting