Moving People: Traffic Congestion, Road Building, and Sustainable Transportation Solutions in Urban Areas, страница 10

Cities in developing nations cannot simply look to the Western world for model solutions to environmental challenges.  This is not realistic because the pace of globalization and development is drastically accelerated from earlier rates and environmental justice concerns are altered frequently; new models and solutions must be cultivated for each specific location (Marcotullio and Boyle, 2003).  The following section highlights two cities that, in their own unique ways, avoided road building as a singular solution to moving people and goods.

3.3  Alternate Strategies: Curitiba and Amsterdam Examples

Curitiba in Brazil and Amsterdam in The Netherlands are recognized for their innovative and more sustainable public transport systems.  The former urban area is in what is customarily referred to as a developing nation while the latter is in a developed nation; both have implemented similar solutions to moving people despite any economic, cultural, and political similarities.  Curitiba and Amsterdam cannot be classified as typical cities in developing and developed nations because every metropolitan area has unique indicators (i.e., income level, geography, median age) that separate it from other areas.  Yet, there are sustainable components in each that planners and government officials elsewhere may use.

Because both Amsterdam and Curitiba have invested in and implemented public transportation infrastructure, they have reaped the benefits for a long time.  In Amsterdam, “40 percent of workers in the city commute by car, 35 percent commute by bike or walk, while 25 percent use public transit”; in Curitiba, “one third of the people…own cars, [yet] two thirds of all trips in the city are by bus” (Brown, 2001).  The proportions of the commute mode in Washington, DC are remarkably different.  As shown in Table 1, private vehicles (77%) far surpass public transit (16%) and other modes (7%) in Washington, DC (Brown, 2001).

Table 1. City comparisons (Brown, 2001).

The development of Curitiba in Brazil is a separate lesson in urban planning and expansion.  Curitiba aimed to integrate sustainable transportation into its business development, transport infrastructure formation, and local community advancement.  The city’s Master Plan was created in 1965.  The primary goal of the Plan was to encourage commercial and residential growth along two transport arteries radiating from the city center.  Figure 5 shows the location of the city and its main arterials.  There are now five main arterials as well as other thoroughfares connecting the main city to the surrounding region (Schwartz, 2004).

Figure 5. Curitiba in the State of Paraná, Brazil (Expedia, 2006).

The Master Plan also aimed to promote self-sufficient neighborhoods by providing all districts with adequate civil services, such as education, health care, and recreation. The planners of Curitiba removed the traditional focus on the city center as the regional nucleus, which reduced central congestion.  More importantly, the Plan sought flexibility in its regulations to allow for other development scenarios as needed (Birk, 1993).  For example, a large section of the city center was later devoted exclusively to pedestrian transport; Figure 6 shows a typical scene in