Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to popular areas such as downtown commercial areas. Increasing numbers of urban
places, of different sizes, have added rapid bus routes, or light rail, or tram systems,
which have been created or revived in many cities to encourage greater transit use,
especially for commuters, often with the incentive of free or low cost car parking at
the main suburban transit stops. However there is usually a need for a critical mass
of population and high densities along routes for these systems to be worthwhile,
so only bigger cities have light rail systems and is why Transit Orientated Develop-
ments (Chap. 2) have become popular planning policies in recent years. Although
many of the early mass transit lines from the mid nineteenth century were private
ventures, the high costs involved and the problem of acquiring land or getting per-
mission to run lines underground now mean that most mass transit systems are in
some kind of public ownership. Moreover, cities cannot afford these measures by
themselves, so their construction is largely dependent on finance from higher levels
of government, in which some justify the measures as being as necessary to urban
functioning as the creation of sewer systems. In the last two decades major cities in
the developing world are also adding mass transit systems, with China especially
making it a priority. Although it was only started in 1993, by the end of 2013 the
Shanghai Metro had over 500 km in 12 routes, with plans for another 22 lines cover-
ing 877 km by 2020, which would make it by far the biggest and most travelled sys-
tem in the world. Thirty one other Chinese cities either have mass transit lines or are
constructing them, part of a $ 150 billion investment by the national government.
This policy is designed, along with high density apartment blocks at transit stops, to
avoid the commuting congestion found in western cities, brought about by increas-
ing car ownership among the new middle class and which is now being restricted.
Perhaps this type of Chinese progress can only be achieved by an increasingly
wealthy country with a centralized decision-making structure. But it forms a great
contrast to the situation in most western countries where relatively few extra Metro
lines are being added, although cities such as Paris, Copenhagen, London, Ma-
drid and Barcelona, represent exceptions, but nowhere near the scale that is really
needed.
Figure
6.2
shows Copenhagen's mass transit system, which complements its ex-
tensive bus network. This consists of an underground Metro system completed in
the past few years which connects major nodes in the city as well as to the airport at
Kastrup. Another underground network, the Cityringen, is planned for completion
by 2018 and will link more of the inner suburbs to the existing Metro system and
the main suburban and rail nets. In addition, the figure summarizes the major poli-
cies adopted to increase the general level of sustainability to assist this progressive
city in reaching a target of being a carbon neutral city by 2025 (WWE
2013
). So the
new mass transit systems are only part of a wider strategy to reduce carbon dioxide
and other emissions, illustrating the way this city is using a number of policies to
achieve its general aim. As Chap. 5 has shown, it is already regarded as the city with
the most sustainable rating in Europe.
At the more mundane level of bus transport, many of the originally private
companies that provided these services were absorbed into municipal or even state
ownership in many developed countries after World War II. In some countries they
have been returned to some form of private ownership. Although ownership may be
