Moving Millions

This book demonstrates how transportation strategy and environmental sustainability can be pursued in a comprehensive and harmonious, rather than unconnected and potentially conflicting, set of public policies. It applies lessons from several urban areas (e.g., Bogota, Singapore, Mexico City, Sao Paulo), including success stories and less successful hard-won lessons , to a case study in Guangzhou. From these examples, a number of useful guidelines emerge on how the competition for resources between transportation policy and environmental sustainability can be resolved to support continued economic development in megacities. Among the themes identified in the book are the need for a comprehensive approach that is tailored to local institutional and cultural norms, the need to understand the tradeoffs among competing goals and resolve them in a balanced strategy, the importance of demand-side management as compared to traditional approaches of investment in new capacity, the usefulness of a range of options in public-private partnerships to strengthen the financial and institutional capabilities needed for sustainable transportation, and regardless of the policy that is finally implemented the critical role of government in providing leadership and the underlying institutional framework needed to ensure success.