Urban Transport in the OIC Megacities
13
technology allows much greater travel time flexibility, including mobile working. Travel can be
replaced by more “at home” activities such as working from home, shopping and booking holidays. As
such the key policy objective now becomes that of reasonable and reliable travel time, rather than
travel time minimization (Low and Astle, 2009; Banister, 2008).
Various policies to manage the existing network capacity have been applied across the world, with
different levels of success. Regulatory policy instruments have played an important role in shaping
urban transport performance. Measures to manage car use and optimize the use of the existing
network capacity commonly include parking restrictions, emissions standards and driving
restrictions. Although such measures theoretically cover a wide range of objectives including
improving air quality, reducing congestion and increasing the efficiency of network utilization, many
case studies show that regulatory measures alone often fail to fulfil their potential.
3.3.1.2. Transport network and infrastructure of megacities in developing countries
In developing countries, the monocentric form of street design and planning that characterised many
cities in the colonial era started to change in the 20th century and accelerated with the independence
of countries from the 1950s onwards. Street designs became more irregular following the
peripherisation of urban growth and the displacement of poorer groups to the outskirts of cities. The
levels of road infrastructure vary among countries of the developing world, reflecting to a large extent
the economic status of each country. Less than 10% of land area is devoted to roads in many cities of
Africa, South and Southeast Asia (e.g. Nairobi, Kolkata, and Jakarta) compared to 15-20% in many
rapidly emerging economies (e.g. Seoul and Sao Paulo), 20-25% in much of the continental Europe
(e.g. London and Paris) and 35% or more in America’s largest automobile oriented cities (e.g. Houston
and Atlanta). However, the biggest problem for developing countries is that the infrastructure
provision and its development are inconsistent with the growth in traffic volumes. In India, the annual
traffic growth rate in the 1990s was around 5% in Mumbai, 7% in Chennai and 10% in Delhi despite
the fact that these cities only expanded their network by 1% (United Nations, 2013a; Cervero, 2013).
In the countries with the lowest levels of road network development, except for the lack of road
capacity, another major issue is the lack of road hierarchy that allows for efficient traffic flows from
local streets to distributor/collectors and to main arterials. For instance, Nairobi, Kenya, a city of 4
million inhabitants, has few collector streets and major through roads compared to similar sized
developed cities. In addition, the city’s arterial roads are mostly radial and the lack of circumferential
roads brings heavy amounts of traffic through the central business district with significant effects on
traffic flows. The situation is similar in Lome, Togo, a city of nearly 1.5 million (INSSED-Togo, 2015),
where the trucks leaving the port are directed into the core of the city in the absence of bypass road
around the city (Cervero, 2013).
Another crucial problem in developing countries is the lack of maintenance of existing transport
infrastructure, which is being neglected in favour of starting new, highly visible projects. According to
the World Bank, the fact that many countries tend to favour new construction, rehabilitation, or
reconstruction over maintenance has led to a steady increase in the parts of the network that need to
be repaired and a loss of development impact. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, for every kilometre
of road rehabilitated, an estimated three kilometres of road fall into disrepair, leading to a net
deterioration in the total road network. In a rapidly growing urban environment, the condition of the
poorly maintained road network is aggravated by a high number of vehicles using the network and
particularly heavy trucks as wear and tear exponentially rises with the dead axle weight of a vehicle.
In turn, poorly maintained streets slow trucks more than lighter vehicles, which results in increased
vehicle operating costs and has an overall effect on congestion (Rioja, 2003; Burningham and
Stankevich, 2005; Cervero, 2013).
However, the need for additional, key infrastructure in the cities and megacities of the developing
world is not always addressed using what is considered best practice. On the contrary, in many cases,
the adopted solutions involve increasing the capacity of the network and the provision of parking