Urban Transport and the Environment

Abstract

At the present time, emissions of greenhouse gases from transport are continuing to rise in almost all countries, at a rate much higher than those from industrial or domestic use.If this trend continues, transport will certainly be the largest sector influencing the global atmospheric environment in the 21st century.Even now in many of the developed countries, car ownership and use are continuing to rise.On the other hand, although engine technology has recently been much improved, the usage level of low emission cars is still much lower than that needed to clear up environmental problems.For this reason, the reduction of local atmospheric pollution caused by transport in urban areas has also not been as successful as it should have been.In developing countries, along with the increase in income, there is a rapid shift from walking and cycling to motorised transport.Since many of the motorized vehicles are aged or poorly maintained, deterioration of the environment especially in urban areas has been getting worse.Especially in rapidly growing countries, where motorisation is occurring at a very swift pace while the automobile maintenance system is not developing at the corresponding rate, local environmental pollution is very serious.Moreover, the potential impact of this local traffic on the global environment as a whole is becoming critical.Although various countermeasures have been taken both in developed and developing countries, their effects have tended to be limited because of lack of systematic implementation.It is also a sad fact that the valuable experiences of one country are not sufficiently reflected in the policy measures taken by other countries.In order to adequately address the environmental problems arising from transport, it is imperative to gather the policy experiences from each country into a knowledge-base which can be shared by all.This book focuses particularly on urban transport, since this is a serious local issue with a significant influence on the global environment.It attempts firstly to understand the current conditions of urban transport and the environment.Then it tries to give a picture of what sort of measures can be taken to improve the situation and what their effects on the environment would be.For this purpose, the relationships of the various objectives, measures and effects are first presented systematically.Since these objectives, measures and effects may differ from country to country and from city to city, experiences in different cities in the world, collected through international cooperative research, are presented.By compiling them into a future perspective for transport and the environment, the book aims to identify future issues and suggest policy directions to contribute to more integrated measures for cities around the world in order to improve the local and global environment.For understanding the environmental problems of urban transport and finding suitable countermeasures, it is important to have adequate knowledge not only of transport planning and engineering but also of the mechanisms of environmental impacts and of the effectiveness of measures.This book is designed for researchers, practitioners and students who work in either the transport or the environment field and are interested in an integrated understanding

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