2 minute read
Cities
and more than 20 cities were assisted in improving their institutional capacity for urban transportation. Given these successes, additional financing was approved in December 2020, extending the project until 2024 with loans worth up to US$150 million (World Bank 2020b).
The World Bank has also recently supported the implementation of several public transportation projects in other regions, including metro lines in Colombia starting in 2018 (World Bank 2018) and bus rapid transit extensions in Peru starting in 2020 (World Bank 2019a). Advancing such projects in the Middle East and North Africa economies is important given their notoriously low use of public transportation (box 3.8).
Nonmotorized transportation options. Increasing the share of nonmotorized transportation is another important step toward reducing emissions and raising air quality. Facilitating and promoting the switch away from transportation in combustion vehicles altogether could further reduce air pollution while simultaneously inducing more physical
BOX 3.8
Adoption of public transportation by large parts of the population is low in many major cities of the Middle East and North Africa. In its recent “MENA Transport Report 2019,” the International Association of Public Transport compared the modal shares in some of the region’s cities with those in major cities of other regions (UITP 2019). Figure B3.8.1 shows the number of trips by public transportation as a share of all motorized trips. It includes selected major cities within the Middle East and North Africa for which the modal share was reported in the past 10 years alongside the modal shares of other international cities in 2012.
As can be seen, the modal share of public transportation in the selected Middle East and North Africa cities is generally rather low relative to the international comparators. With few exceptions (Oran in Algeria as well as Tehran and Tabriz in the Islamic Republic of Iran), public transportation accounts for less than a quarter of motorized trips in the region’s cities under consideration. Especially cities in the high-income countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), where cars are a symbol of prestige, have relatively low public transportation use compared with cities of comparable income levels. Hence, inducing a switch of the modal share toward mass transit and nonmotorized forms of transportation such as cycling or walking may also need some form of cultural rethinking to make the latter socially more accepted.
(continued)
