Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
18
Transport authorities may be responsible for both the transportation network and operation.
Transport authorities can also have powers to impose taxes, collect fees and impose fines. All
the transport authorities in the sample are controlled by locally elected officials and some with
users and private sector represented. Probably Beijing and New Zealand Authorities have the
most comprehensive mandates.
National, but also regional transport authorities play a key role, both in the planning and in the
operational phase. With such a wide choice of integrated land use and transport planning
entities to look at and the continued favour that such organizations are given by professionals,
the question is whether there has been any objective assessment of their performance. In other
words, are they achieving the results that were expected of them and is the paradigmbetter than
the vertically established systems that transport authorities replaced. If such an assessment was
made, that would be very instructive to the OIC Member States. Literature however has not
revealed such ex-post evaluations of transport authorities, which is surprising given their
significance in the governance of public transport and the very large sums of funding that is
channelled through them. However Cameron (2005) does critically review the establishment of
transport authorities in the Republic of South Africa. The weakness of the transport authority
regime that he noted was i) cost, ii) legality, iii) bureaucratic inclinations, iv) leadership, v) low
priority for transport, vi) capacity, vii) legality of councillors to make decisions. Whereas the
compelling reasons for transport authorities were identified as being i) overcoming the
fragmentation of transport planning and management, ii) limiting jurisdiction of individual local
authorities, iii) improving accountability and iv) improving coordinating and marketing of
services. It can be deduced from his critique that Cameron (2005) was not a supporter of
transport authorities. However, evidence suggests from the number of successful transport
authorities i hat none of the issues raised are unsolvable.
2.4. Technical Factors
Technical factors in NTI planning deal with an integrated approach of policy and transport
modes. The integration of policy aspects such as land use and multi-modal transport logistics is
crucial for more resilient and sustainable planning outcomes (Arts, Hanekamp and Dijkstra,
2014) as sustainability has been strongly driving the transport policy agenda in the last decade
(see sectio .
National Center for Transit research (2014) suggested that conventional transportation
planning treats future land use plans largely as a “given” and attempts to solve anticipated traffic
congestion resulting from these plans primarily by increasing roadway capacity. Contemporary
transportation planning practice explicitly recognizes the interrelationship of transportation
and land use planning, the importance of multimodal investments in managing travel demand,
and the need for coordinating land use strategies with modal investments (se .