The working group on "Access to Transport for the Urban Poor" broke new ground, both intellectually and conceptually to join together the typically highly technocratic discipline of transport with the more people-cantered concepts of governance and participation. Accomplished under the umbrella of urban poverty, participants explored the particular ways in which transport is both a cause and an effect of poverty and on how principles and practices of the community participation could be used in the transport decision-making arena to enhance their opportunities at effective action.

What follows is a brief overview of both the plenary presentations on urban transport; papers and discussions on the four modules within the working group, as well as a summary of the major findings, conclusions and recommendations for future action.

1.     Plenary Presentations

1.1     Urban Poor and Access to Urban Transport
          Dr. V. Setty Pendakur (University of British Columbia, Canada)

During the past 50 years, while the mechanical speed (capacity of surface transport vehicles) has increased more than fourfold, the social speed (capacity of average citizens to go from place to place) has decreased tremendously, in some cases to less than half of what it was fifty years ago. The phenomenal increase in motorization all over the world (cars and motorcycles) has been accompanied by tremendous traffic congestion, lack of adequate, efficient and low-cost public transport, and detrimental impacts on public health due to transport induced air pollution. In all this change, the urban poor are the group most adversely affected.

The urban poor have suffered the negative consequences of growth and change in several ways:

1. The time taken for journey work has increased more significantly than for other groups;
2. The urban transport costs have been increased more significantly than their incomes because of a number of complex reasons including the costs of petroleum products, vehicles and technology, privatization, distorted planning and human settlements pushing the poor to the periphery;
3. Most urban governments have not expanded and improved public transport to keep up with population growth and transport demand growth. The urban poor depend upon public transport as they have no access to private motorized vehicles;
4. Because Non-Motorized Transport (NMT) is cheap and efficient for short- to medium-distance journeys, the predominant users of NMT in poor countries are the urban poor. NMT modes in many countries have been assigned very low priority for infrastructure improvements and investments, and in some cases even restricted and/or removed from busy areas. There appears to be a technocratic mentality that attaches symptoms of technological leprosy to NMT.
5. Investment and regulatory polices, modelled on the Western systems of narrow economic thinking of the 1960s and 1970s, still favour motorized vehicles and often completely disregard NMT.

1.2     Mumbai Transport Case Study
          "One David and three Goliaths", Ms. Sheela Patel and Ms. Kalpana Sharma, India

This is the story of David and Goliath, except that the David in this story had to encounter three Goliaths. Whether he won in the end cannot be determined as of yet, the chances look good.

This case study looks at events which link the lives of some of Mumbai's poorest communities to Mumbai's transport problems and how efforts to improve the transport situation, impact people's lives depending on the choices that governments and others investing in the solutions make. It demonstrates two important points: one, that development projects in the city are not isolated activities but are historically linked to many other processes that impinge directly on the lives of the poor; and two, that communities of the poor and their organizations, given time, space and opportunity, can be centrally involved in designing solutions that benefit both communities and cities.

As investment in transport infrastructure grows to meet the needs of rapidly expanding mega-cities like Mumbai, more attention must be paid to addressing issues of resettlement and rehabilitation

2.    Working Group

2.1    Transport, poverty alleviation and human settlements
         (Dr. Walter Hook, Executive Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, USA)

Dr. Hook provided the opening contribution to this theme and suggested posing two main questions:

1. How to involve the poor in the transport decision-making process;
2. How to facilitate an outcome where the outcome helps the poor?

Dr. Hook also argued against focusing too much on formal structures of participation which are almost always at the local level of government. He contended that for most transport-related infrastructure that could help or hinder poor people, this is a much too low strategic point of intervention. Moreover, it may well be that groups operating at this level may well lack appropriate technical expertise which can ultimately discredit the entire participatory contribution and process.

He went on to argue that effective participatory action could result from user groups and coalitions of user groups themselves. Dr. Hook contended that supporting such local advocacy groups is one of the most effective ways external donor agencies can support the poor in developing countries, not only in the transport sector. He quoted the work of the Budapest Clean Air Action Group in successfully opposing damaging and wasteful highway and metro projects that would have done harm to low-income communities as an example of "local action". On the basis of a number of case studies, Dr. Hook argued that the only way to facilitate better transport for the poor lay in fostering and supporting groups that are able to represent their interests. It required people who are able to deal effectively with the media, who are articulate, have knowledge of transport generally and who have access to adequate resources. Members may not necessarily all be drawn from the poor but the crucial issue is to form strategic alliances of stakeholders, many of whom may be the rich themselves.
 
2.2    Gender issues in transport
        "Gender, Poverty and Transport: A Call for Policy Attention", Ms. Margaret Grieco (University of North London) and Mr. Jeff Turner (University of Manchester)

Across the body of our research, it has become clear to us that women's greater domestic responsibilities coupled with their weaker access to household resources have significant consequences on their transport and travel status. The lower the income of a household, the more probable it is that women experience greater household deprivation than men. Transport deprivation may take the form of women's journeys having multiple purposes and thus generating greater anxiety in the travel context; it may take the form of customary or legal constraints on women's rights to travel or to use a particular transport mode.

Despite the now almost universal recognition that women's domestic load, often in combination with low paid or unpaid work, leaves women both time-poor and resource-poor, the implications of this situation for transport and travel have largely gone unconsidered and unremarked. Development projects all too frequently accept the immobility of women as a natural and unchangeable social state which simply explains the low level of women's participation in project planning and design even within communal or popular planning modes. The possibility of bringing about participative forums where women are to be found rarely receives adequate attention and projects which attempt to move the boundaries around women's access to transport and travel are few and far between. Developing women-friendly transport and travel service has, with a few notable exceptions, generally held a low-priority status in policy-maker's thinking both in the developed and developing worlds. Yet any attempt to tackle poverty systematically must, given the social composition of the poor, tackle gender disparities to access and opportunities.

What can be done? In order to bring about a reduction in urban poverty, we must pay attention to the specific gender aspects of the poverty trap. We need protocols in transport policy and planning which explicitly address the gender dimension:

1. In terms of researching how gender plays out in the interaction with the transport and travel system;
2. In terms of ensuring that sensitisation to gender is a part of the professional training process;
3. In terms of ensuring adequate gender representation within the profession and;
4. In terms of ensuring adequate representation within user groups.

The need for innovative approaches to alleviate urban poverty and to improve access to transport for the urban poor is widely recognized. Labour-based technologies are seen as an innovative method for constructing and maintaining access and transport infrastructure in unplanned settlements thus, not only improving living conditions, but also generating employment within affected communities. Community-based organizations can be partners in constructing and maintaining small-scale urban infrastructure in unplanned settlements such as footpaths and bicycle-ways; those forms of infrastructure most commonly used by the poor.

However, in implementing various projects in Kenya, Sri Lanka, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, and Zambia ILO/ASIST has learned the following lessons which are instrumental in recognizing when future projects are undertaken:

1. Policy-makers and planners at the central and local level of government, including city and community councils are not fully aware of the advantages of labour-based approaches;
2. Organizing communities is very time-consuming. Various pilot projects are not sustainable as inadequate time has been allocated to groups for capacity-building. The CBO is thus not able to maintain the infrastructure over a long period of time in their role as managing agent;
3. Urban infrastructure is significantly more expensive to construct and maintain than rural infrastructure due to higher densities of population. This manifests itself in the need for greater dialogue with the community to prevent demolitions; the high number of obstacles on the ground and the greater number of crossings which need to be constructed;
4. The maintenance of the infrastructure must be addressed from the start of the project, by involving all parties in conjunction with training programmes. Organizational structures, policies and laws also need to be adjusted and suited to very particular situations. By-laws may, for example, allow communities to obtain funds for maintenance from the population served by the project.

Activities will focus on changing current transport planning practices to favour those practices which will promote the rights of people living in poverty, including women and children, to achieve equitable levels of accessibility. This will be done by creating new mechanisms allowing the poor to participate in the transport planning process. Specific activities will include capacity-building of local groups by enhancing and extending the Sustainable Transport Action Network for Asia and the Pacific (SUSTRAN) information network to other regions of the world, including Africa and Latin America; provision of financial resources and technical assistance to local groups representing poor people; developing gender-aware transport planning methodologies for evaluating transport infrastructure investments and other access-promoting initiatives.

Other activities will include:

1. Organizing and supporting a series of small regional meetings to provide further outreach and networking opportunities to regions currently underserved;
2. Commission and publish a series of working papers on the issue of transport and the poor for dissemination to local, regional and international transport policy-makers;
3. Work with Forum participants to monitor the activities of multilateral development institutions, bilateral donors and other international development institutions involved in transport programming. This work will include monitoring country plans of action from the Habitat II Global Plan of Action.