STRATEGIES Interview José Viegas International Transportation (67) 1 | 2015 6 “Transport policy matters! ” The world of mobility is becoming ever more complex. Increasing traic volumes in rapidly growing metropolitan regions contrast with numerous opposing phenomena such as ‘peak car’, climate change or-digitalization, which are not really tangible for most citizens, however. We must do something - but-what? Our interview with José Viegas, Secretary-General of the International Transport Forum at-the-OECD. Professor Viegas, let us talk about the real challenges for tomorrow’s mobility. Where are we today, and what do we need to focus on? The world is changing faster than ever. There is a great transport transformation, too: Bits and bytes are replacing oil, steel and concrete as the drivers of transport. Disruptive business models and non-traditional players are challenging the established champions, for instance - think of Uber’s ride-sharing service or Google’s role in taking forward automated driving. Against this backdrop, there are challenges in all shapes and sizes. Without particular order I think, irst, of the rapid digitalization, growing connectivity and increasing automation. This is driving massive change in transport and goes to the core of how the sector works and thinks. As in other sectors, automation will advance and bring to the fore very serious social issues, as job proiles change and certain job proiles will disappear. Second, there is the massive urbanization in emerging regions of the world. For cities to be hubs of economic opportunity and social inclusion, they need to ofer equitable access to jobs and social services, which requires sustainable, afordable, accessible transport provision. Third, climate change requires the de-carbonization of transport, which contributes roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Technology alone is not the answer; signiicant contributions must come from a more eicient organization of mobility. And, last but not least, road safety is another major challenge. 1.3 million people die on the world’s roads every year, with 90% of these fatalities occurring in developing nations. What about freight transport? Looking at the freight and logistics side, we are facing rising uncertainty for global supply chains. One of these uncertainties is more extreme weather - events like the massive loods and tsunamis of recent years, which have demonstrated their potential to cause large-scale disruptions in global goods exchange and production. Consequently, one challenge is to make our transport systems, both infrastructure and services, more resilient to such external shocks. Then there is the twin challenge of dramatic growth of global freight volumes and shifting trade patterns. We have modelled scenarios for international freight volume growth up to 2050 in the recently published ITF Transport Outlook 2015, and we believe it could more than quadruple over the coming decades. That will create enormous pressure on the capacity of our transport infrastructure. At the same time, the lows of goods around the globe will not follow the same patterns as today. The North Paciic will replace the North Atlantic as the busiest trade route, for example. And intra-Asian trade as well as intra-African trade will grow very strongly, so much more freight will be transported across inland regions, in areas with limited infrastructure. Unless signiicant investment is made in railways in those areas, transport will be made by road there, and so drive up emissions. What needs to be done to ensure that transport is a force for social inclusion? Good mobility is one of the outcomes of an eicient transport system, but it’s not an end in itself. The true vocation of transport is to provide citizens with access - access to things that make their lives easier, better, more productive, more worthwhile. On the other hand, in the non-transport arena there needs to be more awareness of the critical role of transport as key enabler. To provide access to education, for instance, you need schools, the core infrastructure. But often the decision on the location of a new school takes into consideration land requirements for the school’s educational program, but pays less attention to how its teachers, support staf and especially the children will be able to get there. Access is not only an issue in poor underdeveloped countries. ITF recently did a study for the government of Finland on providing reasonable access to services in remote and sparsely populated regions. The study triggered a debate among Finnish parliamentarians whether a revision of their deinition of public transport was needed. Ultimately, transport is one of the great facilitators - and at the same time a largely underrated facilitator - for the success and cohesion of our societies. Today’s large-scale urbanization goes hand in hand with growing demand for- individual mobility. Will we see an unstoppable increase in car traic? Impact of alternative policies on urban modal split Latin American Cities Public Transport policies 82% 6% 11% 44% 7% 50% Car-oriented policies Chinese Cities 78% 13% 9% 57% 9% 34% Car-oriented policies Public Transport policies 67% 17% 11% 5% 40% 9% 12% 39% Indian Cities Car-oriented policies Public Transport policies (Passenger-km, 2050 projection) Urban policy choices scenarios Graph: ITF Interview José Viegas STRATEGIES International Transportation (67) 1 | 2015 7 Estimates say that with growing incomes in emerging economies, 3 billion people will join the middle class in the coming decades. These people are striving for the lifestyles of the developed world, and the prime expression of that is buying a car, and then another. There is a debate as to whether we have seen ‘peak car’ in some developed countries, because there car ownership and distances traveled seem to have stopped rising. But any ‘peak car’ in the West will be dwarfed by the opposite development in the emerging economies. To this trend add the demographic trend of exploding urbanization: By 2050, 70 % of the world’s population will live in cities, up from 50 % today. Populous countries like China are actively promoting urbanization. The ITF has modelled policy scenarios for urban mobility for China, India and Latin America for the coming decades. What we found is that the big cities of those regions will more than double their share of global passenger transport emissions by 2050 - from 9 % to 20 % - if transport policies remain unchanged. But the important message is: There is a policy choice. Take Latin America: If cities there switched now to long-term policies favoring public transport, and deprioritized the building of new road infrastructure, the modal share of cars in 2050 could be half of what we would see under the current policies (see graph). What steps and policy actions need to be taken to make urban mobility systems fit for the future and provide good access opportunities to citizens? First of all, recognize that the strategic goal is equitable access to jobs and services, based as much as possible on active modes such as walking and cycling. Then develop good collective transport solutions that are attractive to all population segments. The digital connectivity mentioned above is opening up great possibilities in this domain, namely shared car rides responding to real-time demand, e.g. shared taxis. It- also opens up the prospect of a new paradigm in bus services that will be nonscheduled and instead respond much more eiciently to the demands of citizens, providing most of them with transfer-free trips. Policy actions in this domain must above all demolish the regulatory barriers that prevent new service patterns from emerging. There are huge investment needs to keep transport infrastructure up to date. Are Public-Private Partnerships really a solution? There is no hard-and-fast rule about whether a PPP is the best solution for an infrastructure investment project. Not all projects are appropriate for a PPP, such models have often been adopted for the wrong reasons, namely to get of-balance sheet inancing. Demand estimates and risk assessments should always be subject to independent screening, followed by eicient allocation of risks to the public and private sides. When these requirements are not met, PPPs face a big risk of leading to disastrous results. But when they are met, and the project includes good margins for innovation in design and operational management, they may lead to very positive results. The digital revolution in transport seems non-reversible. Connected and even self-driving cars are becoming a reality. Do you see this as an opportunity, or are the challenges predominant? I see transport at the threshold to a new age of opportunity. There will be challenges, but I don’t think we should let ourselves be governed by fear. The key to success is setting the policy parameters in ways that encourage creativity and innovation, while at the same time limiting potentially negative side-efects. Also at this new frontier, transport policy matters. One source of problems is that innovation is happening so fast today that many new technologies are ready for deployment or already rolled out, while the regulatory environment is lagging behind and therefore fuzzy - a good example here is the recent experience with drones, or with shared rides of various kinds, for that matter. The use of digital technologies in transport is still new, and some serious safety issues have been identified. Quite recently an e-car was hacked in a few minutes, for instance. Are safety and security concerns taken seriously enough? For every sector that is going digital, cyber attacks are a new reality. But as manufacturers and operators in transport move towards basing their ofer on digitally-supported concepts, they will have to beef up their understanding of the associated risks and invest in mitigating them as far as they can. Every CEO in the transport sector should think about what would happen if the cyber terrorists that attacked Sony or TV5 Monde targeted his company. On the safety side, of course the introduction of new technologies may cause safety issues. But on balance, digitalization of transport greatly contributes to its safety, through ine-tuned actions - think airbags, ABS, ESC - as well as by quickly identifying hazards and supporting the decisions to avoid them. One area that is a serious concern and needs urgent relection is data privacy. Mobility data of citizens is particularly sensitive. Merged with other data it allows new insights that can spur innovation, but it is also extremely personal and very diicult to protect. In a world of smartphones and GPS sensor technology, all you need to identify a speciic person with 95% accuracy using anonymized mobility data is four co-located data points, for instance Facebook status updates, online credit card transactions or Wi-Fi log-ins. I think we all should keep an eye on this evolution. ■ José Viegas has been Secretary-General of the International Transport Forum at the OECD since August 2012. A Portuguese national, Viegas had a distinguished career in academia and in the private sector before joining the Forum as its chief executive. A full Professor of Transport at the Technical University of Lisbon, he served as Director of MIT-Portugal’s Transport Systems focus area. As chairman of TIS.pt consultants, he advised governments and international institutions on key transport projects and policies At the helm of the ITF, Viegas has implemented new initiatives to increase value for member countries. He has created a work stream for rapid-delivery policy analysis for countries, strengthened ITF’s links with the private sector through the ITF Corporate Partnership Board and advanced the harmonisation of pan-European road freight transport. Viegas holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Lisbon and undertook postgraduate studies in regional studies at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He speaks fluent Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian.