One of the toughest environmental and social challenges of our time is managing the mobility of people and goods. By 2030, passenger traffic will exceed 80,000 billion passenger-kilometers—a fifty percent increase—and freight volume will grow by 70 percent globally.
In fast-growing places like India, China, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, billions of people will have higher lifestyle expectations, and new mobility aspirations. Mega projects like the China’s One Belt, One Road will connect more than half of the world’s population and roughly a quarter of the goods and services that move around the globe through maritime links and physical roads. Globally, the number of vehicles on the road is expected to double by 2050.
Having a long-term term perspective which focuses on sustainability is a defining factor in the future of mobility. And yet, transport was not endorsed as a distinct global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), largely because the sector could not talk with one voice to influence this global process.
Some elements of transport were included in various SDGs, (e.g., road safety, carbon emissions, etc.) and over the past two years, the international community made several commitments related to transport. For instance, transport is a key policy component of the action program that landlocked developing states have agreed upon, evolving them toward land-linked states. Also, the international community adopted the New Urban Agenda at the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, which outlined the importance and imperative of improving the sustainability of transport systems to mitigate the challenges of rapid urbanization.
Transport provides a critical enabling environment to support economic and social development necessary to reach the SDGs. For example, transport is a primary consumer of fossil-fuel energy, so it is critical to the achievement of SDG 7 on energy.
Likewise, transportation is indispensable to achieving SDG 9 (building resilient infrastructure) and SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities, realized through improvements in road safety and by expanding public transportation).
In addition, rural road access is highly correlated to poverty incidence. There is also a strong association between transport activity and economic development.
The transport sector has the potential to improve the lives and livelihoods of billions of people—their health, their environment, their quality of life—and stabilize climate change. But today it is stuck going in the wrong direction, with transport contributing to gross inequalities in access to economic and social opportunities, rising numbers of deaths resulting from transport-related accidents, intensive fossil fuel use, massive emissions of greenhouse gasses, as well as air and noise pollution.
The social, environmental and economic challenges are clear. However, a leadership vacuum still exists at the global level, without a clear set of principles to transform the sector. There is a way forward, but it requires all the stakeholders to work together to achieve it:
First, the sector can no longer afford a fragmented approach. It is time to bring greater coherence and talk with one voice to influence global and country processes. The approach adopted so far, in which a multitude of actors—UN agencies, multilateral development banks, the manufacturing industry, civil society, etc.—all acting independently has failed to bring the scale of actions and financing to transform mobility. Pulling these different actors together is not impossible. The energy sector partners embarked on this same journey in 2010, enabling energy to be mainstreamed into all global agreements on sustainable development and to possess the credibility and reliability required to attract private and development finance partners.
Second, we need to clearly define the objectives underpinning sustainable mobility. In this vein, the SDG framework does not provide a clearly defined trajectory for mobility, but rather includes elements to build on. For example, the SDGs embody the notions of “universal access,” road safety, energy efficiency, and deaths from air pollution. From there, it is possible to define a vision for sustainable mobility, around four global goals: (1) equitable access; (2) security and safety; (3) efficiency; and (4) pollution and climate-responsiveness. Under this vision, sustainable mobility would include a better provision of infrastructure and services to support the movement of goods and people. This outcome would be achieved only because the four goals are pursued simultaneously and trade-offs among them are managed.
Third, the economic evaluation of transport projects should be radically transformed. Traditional cost-benefit analyses of those projects focuses on travel time reduction—a proxy for efficiency. However, there is a trade-off between speed and fatalities, for example. The costs of crashes can actually reverse expected efficiency benefits from increasing transportation speeds. Integrating other sustainability dimensions, like safety, green characteristics, and inclusivity, will significantly affect project evaluation, and therefore transform project design — and this is the right way forward. No road project, for example, should be financed without due consideration for safety, equity, and climate impact.
How can technology help the future of mobility?
Technology will form the backbone of mobility in the future. By 2020, a large portion of mobile devices and connections will be in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. More data and connectivity can lead to more efficient and convenient mobility, offering great opportunities for developing countries to leapfrog existing legacy technologies and practices. For example, advances in analytics, automation, and the “Internet of Things” are already showing great promise in reducing consumption, including the consumption of energy.
Additional mobility services provided to users on smartphones have already started a move away from vehicle ownership toward shared vehicle usage in many mega cities, as technology-enabled services like car-sharing, ride-hailing, and carpooling are mainstreamed. Connected and autonomous vehicle technology could help optimize roadway utilization, potentially saving billions for future infrastructure expansion.
But the risks associated with new technology must be considered along with the potential benefits. Fundamentally, the car remains the core element of the foreseeable future of mobility. The world could thus end up with congested cities that have a dearth of tax revenues to maintain roads, along with massive job losses pegged to automation. While decision-makers have so far focused on how to improve mobility and shift towards public modes of transportation, the next frontier will be defined by actions to avoid unnecessary physical movement of people and goods, through the use of technology.
Under the Sustainable Mobility for All platform, the World Bank Group has brought together a diverse and high-level group of transport stakeholders committed to transforming mobility, including multilateral developments banks, United Nations bodies, government donors, non-governmental organizations, global civil society, and academia.
These partners will: rally around a common vision, with clearly defined objectives; develop a mechanism of accountability for the sector, with metrics to measure progress; and articulate a program of action and financing to transform the sector. The World Bank Group is already embedding this vision for sustainable mobility in its transport lending. In addition, within the new environment and social safeguards Framework, safety assessments must be considered in the design of all new transport projects.
It is crucial that transport be a part of the global conversation around SDG implementation. This July at the United Nations headquarters, countries will come together for the second annual High Level Political Forum, and share how they are implementing the SDGs at the national level.
At the Forum, the World Bank Group and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs are planning to convene a broad group of stakeholders to share and receive feedback on the draft of the Global Mobility Report, which is the first-ever attempt to examine performance of the transport sector globally, and its ability to support sustainable development. The final report will be released in October.
All of the partners can contribute their unique expertise and perspective to change transport for the better. If these stakeholders work together, they can shape the future of mobility, while also ensuring that all of the SDGs move in the direction of ending poverty and building shared prosperity.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.