Conceiving competitive arrangements for public transport

Despite the existing awareness with regard to the sustainable planning necessary to reduce the environmental, social and economic impacts of transportation, current planning and policies continue to stimulate the roadway capacity expansion and to induce automobile dependence, consequently provoking urban sprawl. The uneven horizontal urban expansion leads to an inefficient transportation network, wherein public transport is unable to be competitive. The usual approach adopted by the public authorities when authorising the concession of public transport operations is quite detached from this reality. Previous work, presented by the Mobile research group at the 8th Thredbo and published by Elsevier, has introduced the concept of effectively integrating the transport-land use relationship, with a real potential to achieve efficiency in public transport and urban development. The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) financed the Mobile group’s study proposing water transport services in a multimodal format as a strategy for sustainable urban development, exploring the local potential and analysing its viability for ten major Brazilian metropolitan areas. This study considered consumer preferences and the participation of indirect stakeholders (real-estate, commercial and service companies) in financing the system, through the integration of transport services in the area adjacent to the terminals and the exploitation of the building potential by developers, with a view to reducing the cost of public transport. This concept incorporated public and private projects that converged to integrate land-use and transport proposals, in which it was necessary for micro-accessibility policies (on the local scale) to fit in with macro-accessibility (on the city-wide or metropolitan scale).