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Report n°6: summary
Urban Public Transport: To what extent — and how — does public transport contribute to sustainable urban development?
In industrialised countries, one of the major challenges of sustainable urban development is that it must be sufficiently effective for city dwellers to select public transport for its attractiveness and not simply because there is no alternative. It is a known fact, recorded by many sources, that users always prefer the statu quo so that the degree of improvement derived from a change must be very significant and above all, perceived to be so. In other words, as regards urban mobility, the level of performance of the alternative must be extremely high if one aims to improve the level of quality of what could be called default use and above all contribute to establish sustainable selective use, recruiting users from the group of non-captives.
The aim of this contribution is to offer a review, with no claim to be all-inclusive, of projects to enhance the performance of public transport. The meaning of performance must therefore be extended to include the capacity of public transport to attract an urban population in a context dominated by private cars, and not just a suitably high economic return on investment.
Our purpose is not to provide an exhaustive review of the relationship between urban mobility and energy expenditure, atmospheric pollution and solidarity within society, but simply to examine some of the major points supporting the legitimacy of public policies in favour of the development of collective urban transport systems.