Although geographical, economic and even social elements play a significant role in current transport planning conducted under the UTP process, the overarching rule of technocratic approaches is still evident even in wealthier countries. This has governed not only the past evolution of transport planning in the industrialised world, but also the way it was transferred to, and further developed in the Global South. Between the 1960s and 1980s the UTP process suffered significant changes in industrialized countries because of revised policy goals related to environmental and social sustainability, while paradoxically the developing world saw countless applications of the process in its initial form (Dimitriou, 1992; Schipper, Mareie-Lillieu, & Gorham,2000; Johnston, 2004, Dickey, 2013). The formalisation and widespread distribution of methodologies and frameworks for urban transport planning in the developed world and the role of development organisations on urban development in countries of the Global South expedited international dialogue and adoption of the UTP in many cities of developing countries (Dimitriou, 1992).
During the decade of the 1960s, the pressing increase in transport demand for private motoring in developing cities pushed local governments facing increasing motorization and demand for public transport without sufficient technical expertise and planning guidelines to seek advice from consultants from more experienced countries (Thomson, 1983). Thus, methods from the early definitions of the UTP were applied in developing countries with minor adaptation to the context of developing cities by consultants under limitations of time and resources related to their contracts (Thomson, 1983). In the years that followed this initial technical transference of approaches to urban transport planning, various North American, European and Japanese consulting firms started offering their expertise to developing
countries at a larger scale, profiting from refinement in modelling techniques and increasing computing capabilities. These studies often led to transport master plans and guidelines for development later adopted by local practitioners (Dimitriou, 1992; Cervero, 2013a). In addition, influence from foreign and local construction companies profiting from infrastructure- centred plans contributed to the consolidation of ambitious transport plans aiming at reforming urban structures through large infrastructure investments with the aims of modernisation, increasing economic output, and employment generation (Rodrigue, Comtois, & Slack, 2013; Vasconcellos, 2001).
Financial aid and capacity building initiatives are inextricably influenced by policy priorities and dominant knowledge in the international agenda (Dimitriou, 2013). In this regard, increasing importance of the role of transport for development in the agenda of international aid agencies from the developed world in the 1970s sought to respond to the transport challenges of cities in the developing world. An example of this is the increase in urban transport lending by the World Bank, which between 1972 and mid-1980s grew from US$32 to US$113 million per year for technical assistance and from 0 to US$13.1 million for training (Thomson, 1983; Dimitriou, 1992). International cooperation missions focused primarily on preparing local practitioners and civil servants in transport to design and implement policies under the UTP. In addition, many studies funded with international development aid produced planning guidelines based on the UTP process for large and medium-sized cities in the developing world, which were later incorporated to requirements for qualifying for external and internal urban transport financing (Dimitriou & Gakenheimer, 2011).
However, international development agencies are not the only agents involved in the transference of policies and planning practices to the Global South. According to the urban policy mobility literature, urban policy has circulated at increasing speed due to a number of factors, leading to what has been termed ‘fast policy’ (Peck & Theodore, 2001; Peck & Tickell,
2002). Better transport and communication has enabled rapid visits to other cities and new forms of evaluation allows rapid engagements with other policies (Peck & Theodore, 2010). In addition, intermediation from institutions such as think tanks and consulting companies has grown considerably since the 1970s, which profit primarily from policy models they produce and circulate (Peck, 2003). Furthermore, as Peck and Theodore (2001) identify, recent decades have witnessed a ‘triumph of politics over policy’, which have influenced policy turnover times aligning them with political cycles. Considering that automobile owners have traditionally been a powerful lobby in the developing world, this aided development of infrastructure-incentive and traffic-centred policies for a good part of the 1980s and 1990s (Gakenheimer, 1999).
These milestones in the foreign and local influence on urban transport planning in the Global South have contributed to mainstreaming approaches linked to the UTP process. In addition, prescriptions from structural adjustment policies9 fostered investments in additional network
capacity in the 1980s in search for improvements in economic performance (Dimitri & Gakenheimer, 2011; Sclar & Touber, 2011). These policies not only added to a rapid change in the structure of transport networks in developing cities, but also to the dissemination and adoption of transport modelling and design tools under the ‘predict and provide’ planning logic. These priorities in conditions for development aid changed in the 1980s and 1990s, incorporating new concerns related to increasing efficiency of public transport. A policy paper published by the World Bank in 1986 for the transport sector (Armstrong-Wright, 1986), which included priorities for urban transport planning in developing countries, stressed the need for
9 Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) were economic policies promoted by the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund (IMF) from the early 1980s through provision of loans to developing countries conditional on the adoption of such policies. These loans were designed to encourage the structural adjustment of a country’s economy by promoting market competition and limiting government intervention as part of a neo-liberal agenda followed by international development agencies.
efficient transport management, involvement of private sector, reduction in subsidies, and incentives to competition under a deregulation framework. This echoed the approaches to planning and policy development in many cities that had started to develop their own solutions to urban transport issues using local ingenuity and increased funding from both local and international sources (i.e. Curitiba, Bogotá, Mexico, Lagos, Bangkok) (Mohan, 2000).
Developments in the late 1990s and 2000’s were more concerned with the issues of sustainability and incorporated some long-standing needs for capacity building, institutional strengthening and focus on public transport and empowerment of non-motorized alternatives. While significant changes in urban transport development were taking place in some cities of the Global South (such as the ones mentioned above) now, these did not influence significantly the framework for urban transport planning and policy evaluation. Discussions on environmental sustainability following the oil crisis of the 1990s strengthened the need for sustainable transport development and focus on efficient mobility systems centred on public transport investments (Schipper, Mareie-Lillieu, & Gorham, 2000). These interventions aimed at using data from technical appraisals to forecast travel demand and design policy instruments that allowed efficient traffic management that reduced the environmental footprint of urban transport development. This shift in the planning logic is now addressed as ‘predict and prevent’, and marked the inclusion of more rigorous criteria of environmental appraisals in transport policies throughout the world, and defined new conditions for local and international financing for infrastructure projects (Nielsen, 2005).
A relatively recent change in the focus and form of transport policies in development was outlined in a 2002 World Bank report, which linked urban development and the transport sector with a strong poverty focus (Godard, 2013). With the change of international interest towards poverty alleviation in relation to development, transport strategies started playing a more
active role as part of programmes aiming to reduce poverty in urban environments (Dimitriou, 2013). This marked the inclusion of new criteria for policy design and evaluation and a debate in developing contexts in relation to the objectives of transport master plans and infrastructure interventions (United Nations Development Programme, 2002).
In this regard, recent theoretical progress in relation to some of the social and environmental issues of transport, and concerns with distributional effects of infrastructure investments have been included in transport planning processes in cities of the developing world. These have produced relevant changes in goal and scale definition of urban transport interventions at the local scale, particularly in cities experiencing high levels of social segregation. However, social considerations have been limited in practice to the evaluation and monitoring spheres of the planning process, with only some project-specific initiatives to address poverty in some developing cities (Carrigan et al., 2014). Similarly, to what was described at the end of the previous section, the influence of shifts in policy priorities and guidelines had a more perceivable effect on the detailed implementation of the urban transport planning process rather than its overall structure.
Top-down developments resulting from traditional planning processes are largely focused on technical and financial appraisals focused on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Such objectives however, tend to be more focused on the general than on the specific. In relation to the definition of equity introduced in Chapter 1, the interpretation of equity in traditional planning processes relate to horizontal equity (Litman, 2014), which requires that resources are allocated evenly to groups (or individuals). As argued by Delbosc and Currie (2011c), this approach can be related with the principles of ‘mass transit’, where it is aimed at maximizing the number of people being transported under adequate conditions of efficiency and cost- effectiveness. However, a different type of equity, vertical equity, implies that disadvantaged groups (or individuals) are identified in planning in order
to design specific policies in their favour, or to insure not to worsen their current conditions (Litman, 2014). The latter is a much-less frequent approach in planning in the Global South, which supports the need for additional debates in relation to seeking ways of incorporating a stronger social dimension in theory and practice around urban transport in cities of developing countries.