Navigating urban mobility challenges through push and pull strategies

Sustainable transportation is a global target as stated in the Sustainable Development Goal 11: sustainable cities and communities. It mentions reducing the external costs of transport such as congestion, pollution, and global warming. This is particularly challenging in rapidly growing cities in low-to-medium-income countries (LMICs) because of increasing motorization rates fostered by factors unlike cities in high-income cities (HICs) such as city characteristics, infrastructure supply, and commuter behavior. Hence, the overarching aim of this dissertation is to resolve the main research question “How can a selection of sustainable transportation policies reduce the external cost of transport, specifically by alleviating urban road traffic congestion?”. I explore the policies by categorizing them into push and pull strategies and use Bangkok as the main study area for illustration. This dissertation makes a significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge concerning sustainable urban transport policies building on the “Avoid – Shift – Improve” (A-S-I) framework with a focus on car-dependent megacities in LMICs, a field that remains empirically and notably underexplored. Chapter 2 explains that the common transport challenges in LMICs are rapid urbanization, increasing incomes, inadequate public transportation infrastructure, and poorly planned investments in transportation. These cities require specification on the link between city characteristics and multi-level policy harmonization in LMICs. The discussion elaborates into two pull strategies – improving the coverage of the urban rail system and promoting the use of shared pooled mobility, and two combining push strategies – pricing road use and charging for parking. Even though mass transits are proposed as a sustainable transport solution, the evaluation of the impact of urban rail transit expansion on the number of taxi trips in Chapter 3 through a quasi-experimental dataset (big taxi GPS data) and the two-way fixed effect (TWFE) difference-in-differences method is a previously uncharted territory. Since shared pooled mobility is a topic that represents the future of urban mobility, this dissertation offers an integrated exploration of the potential demand for shared pooled mobility in Chapter 4, associated climate benefits from shared pooled mobility using provincial-level data in China in Chapter 5, and the necessity for interdisciplinary collaboration within shared pooled mobility in Chapter 6. Most importantly, we provide simulations on the welfare benefits of pricing car use in Chapter 7 – a key transport solution. While discussions surrounding congestion taxes have taken place globally, practical implementations have been limited, primarily observed in HICs like London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore. Furthermore, although parking fees are a well-established concept, they have often been empirically discussed in isolation from congestion-related measures. This holistic sustainable urban transport management approach seeks to address the limitations in the current discourse on urban transportation policies in LMICs. Singapore has proven that by transforming its policy planning approach from using the sectoral approach to holistic planning, cities can transition into the sustainable growth phase. However, Singapore is unique in its size and governance. Thus, this dissertation provides evidence useful for megacities in LMICs that are car-dependent and have low public transit modal share like Bangkok and many cities in China.