Michael Replogle

Sustainable Transportation Strategies for Third World Development

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Conclusions

Major changes are needed in the priorities for transportation policy in the Third World if development is to meet the needs of more than just the world's elite. The costs of failing to redirect transport policies today will be paid in the decades to come through a sharply reduced quality of life in the world's cities, increased conflict between the mobile elite and the mobility restricted poor, and reduced capacity for the global system to deal with the emerging problems of fuel and capital shortages and atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up.

Changes in transport policies are needed not only in the Third World, but also in many advanced industrial and postindustrial countries. It will become increasingly difficult in coming decades for policy makers to ignore the global limits on resource consumption, particularly in the burning of fossil fuels. Our planet will remain a closed atmospheric system with finite limitations for resource extraction and the absorption of man-made pollutants.

Non-motorized transportation cannot be expected to supplant the solidly entrenched motor transport sector in the developed world in the foreseeable future, but it can serve a major portion of local travel needs, as many healthy and wealthy modern communities in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Japan demonstrate.

We must begin soon the transition to a world that recognizes the need for social, as well as economic, development and to a world that is based on sustainable patterns of production and consumption. If we do not, our children shall inherit a legacy of suffering and a world of misery where, as the novelist Russell Banks has written (20),

"in the firmament of cities Kingston and cities like it will soon replace New York and Los Angeles, which in turn will soon replace those dying stars like London and Paris, which in their turn will join the wholly dead suns, cinders like Babylon, Carthage and Karnak. Faced with the realities of Kingston, Caracas, Lima, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, we will grow nostalgic for Los Angeles and New York, and we'll speak of their cleanliness, efficiency and beauty the way today we speak of London's 'old world charm' and the delightful boulevards of Paris."