Affordability of Public Transport in Developing Countries

By R. Carruthers, M. C. Dick, Anuja Saurkar. 2005

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The analysis reported here was prompted by a realization that there was little reliable and consistent information on what proportion of household income is spent on urban public transport. The information available uses inconsistent definitions of what costs are included and how income is measured, making comparisons between cities difficult. The authors report here on about a dozen studies that have addressed the issue of affordability. Though different measures are used in different countries, making it difficult to compare the results between cities, from the studies in South America, South Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, East Asia and Australasia summarized here, the authors make clear that the affordability of urban transport is considered an issue of importance throughout the developing world. There is also evidence that the high cost of urban transport is having a negative impact on the lives of the urban poor - either through restricting their access to jobs that are within feasible walking or cycling distance, by consuming an unsustainable proportion of their income, or by dramatically curtailing the number of journeys that they make. The problem is possibly most grave in Africa, the continent for which there is the least documentation. To address the need for easily available and comprehensive comparative information on affordability of public transport fares, the authors developed an Affordability Index to be used as a first indication of the affordability of fares in a particular city. The second half of this report describes the construction of this Affordability Index and then describes the results from applying this Index to 27 cities.

Subfields: Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1b22a03edea2f91b497de7ada1bd38570bb5e98

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In Transportation

Citations in the corpus

Linking urban transport and land use in developing countries (2013, background): “…and motorized tricycles to and from work can cost 20 to 25 percent of daily wages in rapidly growing cities like Delhi, Buenos Aires, and Manila and as high as 30 percent in Nairobi, Pretoria (South Africa) and Dar es Salaam (Carruthers et al. 2005; Ferrarazzo and Arauz 2000; Kaltheier 2002).”
The equity impacts of bus rapid transit: A review of the evidence and implications for sustainable transport (2018, result): “…a’s TransMilenio (Phase 1) (Gilbert, 2008), Curitiba, and Sao Paulo (Carrigan et al., 2014), while the average fare level of around US$0.80 reported by EMBARQ for other BRT cities (Carrigan et al., 2014) is very similar to that in non-BRT cities [estimated from data in Carruthers et al. (2005)].”
The Cost of Equity: Assessing Transit Accessibility and Social Disparity Using Total Travel Cost (2016, background): “Note that purchasing monthly fares is the most cost-effective manner to access transit, but involves larger up-front costs than single fares (Carruthers et al., 2005).”