Urban Transport Infrastructure November 2018 Urban Transport Infra November 2018 | Page 25

Road Transportation
who benefit the economy of the
centre are not deterred. Separate
arrangements must be made for local
residents, perhaps through permits or
reserved parking.
City authorities can thus control
public car-parking places, but many
other spaces are privately owned by
businesses and reserved for particular
employees. The effect of this is to
perpetuate commuting to work by
car. The future provision of such
space can be limited through
planning
permission
for
new
developments, as is done in London,
but controlling the use of existing
private spaces raises problematical
issues of rights and freedoms that
many countries are reluctant to
confront.
Overall, parking restrictions have
the advantage of being simple to
administer, flexible in application and
easily understood by the public. Their
Achilles’ heel is enforcement, for
motorists are adept at parking where
and when they should not and
evading fines once caught.
Fines in many cities are so low
that being caught once or twice a
week works out cheaper than paying
the parking charge. Indeed, in
London in 1982, a survey showed that
illegal parkers outnumbered legal
ones and only 60 per cent of the fines
were ever paid. Parking controls have
to be stringent and be enforced if they
are to make any significant
contribution to reducing congestion in
the city.
5. Promoting the Bicycle:
The benefits of cycling have long
been recognised. The bicycle is cheap
to buy and run and is in urban areas
often the quickest door-to-door mode.
It is a benign form of transport, being
noiseless, non-polluting, energy-and
space-efficient and non-threatening to
most other road users. A pro-cycling
city would promote fitness among
cyclists and health among non-
cyclists. Cycling is thus a way of
providing mobility, which is cheap
for the individual and for society.
Advocates
of
Environmental
Traffic
Management
(ETM)
frequently cast envious glances at the
Netherlands, where cycle planning is
set in the context of national
planning for sustainability. The
Master Plan Bicycle, which aims to
increase bicycle-kilometers by at least
30 per cent between 1986 and 2010,
not only tackles the traditional
WWW.URBANTRANSPORTNEWS.COM
concerns of cycle infrastructure and
road safety, but also addresses issues
of mobility and modal choice; how to
encourage businesses to improve the
role of the bicycle in commuting;
reducing bicycle theft and increasing
parking quantity and quality;
improving the combination of cycling
and public transport; and promoting
consideration of the bicycle amongst
influential decision makers. These
‘pull’ measures are part of a national
transport strategy of discouraging car
use, which ‘pushes’ motorists towards
use of the bicycle.
6. Encouraging Walking:
Walking is the most important
mode of transport in cities, yet
frequently data on it are not collected
and many planners do not think of it
as a form of transport. As a result of
this neglect, facilities provided
specifically for walking are often
either absent or badly maintained
and pedestrians form the largest
single category of road user deaths.
There
are
social,
medical,
environmental and economic reasons
for promoting walking, for it is an
equitable, healthy, non-polluting and
inexpensive form of transport.
Moreover, ‘foot cities’ tend to be
pleasurable places in which to live,
with access to facilities within
walking distance frequently cited as a
key indicator of neighbourhood
quality of life.
7. Promoting Public Transport:
If ETM aims to shift trips away
from cars, then attractive alternatives
are required. Cycling and walking
may be appropriate for the shorter
distances, but transferring longer
trips requires that a good quality
public transport system is in place to
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ensure that the city can function
efficiently.
This means that:
1. Fares need to be low enough for poor
people to be able to afford them;
2. There must be sufficient vehicles for a
frequent service to be run throughout
the day;
3. Routes must reflect the dominant
desire lines of the travelling public and
there should be extensive spatial
coverage of the city so that no one is
very far from a public transport stop;
4. Speeds of buses need to be raised
relative to cars by freeing them from
congestion;
5. It is not enough to provide public
transport: it also has to be coordinated.
Multi-modal tickets may be one
essential ingredient of a functional
urban transport system, but the key
item is the integration of services by the
provision of connections between
modes.
8. Other Measures:
Some of the other measures useful for
urban transport planning are:
1. Restrictions on road capacity and
traffic speeds,
2. Regulating traffic access to a link or
area,
3. Charging for the use of roads on a
Urban Transport Infrastructure | November 2018