Routledge Improving Urban Access: New Approaches to Funding Transport Investment

Product Description By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. To thrive, they will need efficient and sustainable forms of transport, but to achieve this, the financial incentives guiding urban transport operation must change – and change rapidly. Urban transport plays a critical role in determining the social, environmental and economic shape of cities. Improving Urban Access: New Approaches to Funding Transport Investment provide innovative ideas on how we might reorganize transport finance to ensure that it is suited to serving the social, environmental and economic principles that must guide future urban living. Continuing the work begun by its predecessor, Urban Access for the 21st Century, the authors assess the complexity of implementing new finance approaches and suggest ways to make positive and radical changes. Although the range of revenue raising options remain limited to users, indirect beneficiaries, and the general public, these can be recast to transform the way transport is paid for and therefore how its services are delivered. New finance models only succeed when they are intrinsically linked to the economic, social, cultural and political forces that create urban life. Together these volumes provide a starting point for the deeper research and policy design needed to successfully create urban transport finance systems that can address the challenges that 21st century cities present. Review "Improving Urban Access" provides a wide-ranging introduction to the issues of funding and financing urban transport, ranging from how we got into the current predicament to the prospects for a variety of solutions that might make transport more inclusive, efficiently funded, and soundly managed. The ideas discussed here should be deeply understood by everyone concerned with transport policy and planning." - David M. Levinson, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Richard P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation Engineering "Improving Urban Access is a must-read for the 21st century generation of transport and urban planners. Lessons learned have called for a bold rethinking of planning and implementation of a highway-centered landscape. With an emphasis on access – where access addresses quality of life and place, old models of mobility give way to rethinking the institutions that serve our growing urban areas, the ways in which citizens can finance new transport modes and how – we can achieve a more equitable social structure." - Robert E. Paaswell, Distinguished Professor City University, City College of New York, former CEO of the Chicago Transit Authority "Many public servants are so desperate to "find" additional revenues for urban transportation that they may lose sight of what they are trying to accomplish and why. This book does an excellent job of reminding us that how something is funded directly impacts the societal outcomes we are wishing to achieve, pointing out that careful consideration of funding mechanisms is absolutely critical to success." - Joshua Schank, Chief Innovation Officer, Los Angeles County Metro, former President of the Eno Center for Transportation "Transportation policy scholarship is changing slowly but dramatically, and this second stimulating milestone book by these editors charts that transition. Contributors forcefully address the most important unresolved questions as transportation thinking moves from forecasting demand and providing facilities to a new emphasis on access, social and economic equity, and environmental sustainability." - Martin Wachs, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Urban Planning and Civil Engineering University of California Los Angles and University of California, Berkeley About the Author Elliott D. Sclar is professor of urban planning at Columbia University, USA, where he directs the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) at the Earth Institute. CSUD is a VREF Center of Excellence in Future Urban Transport. An