Metropolitan Transportation Institutions : Six Case Studies - Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States

World Bank

Washington, DC

关键词: CONGESTION;    GOVERNANCE;    METROPOLITAN PLANNING ORGANIZATION;    MPO;    POPULATION GROWTH;   

RP-ID  :  73717

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Transportation has always played afundamental role in the formation of cities. Ports evolvedwhere rivers flowed into the ocean or at the confluence ofmajor rivers; sleepy outposts at the junction of major roadsbecame bustling trading hubs. Although this relationshipbetween transportation and development has been evidentsince the creation of the earliest urban societies, allprevious conceptions of the city were made obsolete by theadvent of the industrial revolution. The transportationchallenges raised by this new city centered on congestion.Early forms of transit provided some relief, but as motorvehicles became common place, existing urban streets wereoverwhelmed. As roadways were enlarged and expresswaysconstructed, the population of new suburbs expanded and theautomobile became the dominant form of transportation inmany developed cities. To address issues at this scale,cities and countries around the world have developed newinstitutions that sit between the scale of local and higherorder governments. The example of Boston, presented in theaccompanying figure, is illustrative. The city of Boston hasa population of 620,000, but its metropolitan area iscommonly defined to include 101 cities and towns with 4.5million total residents. An organization known as aMetropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) that covers theterritory of all the cities and towns in the region has beencreated to coordinate planning of major transportationinvestments. The primary purpose of the current study is toprovide an overview of the ways in which systems ofmetropolitan transportation governance are organized in asix different countries in order that these systems mightprovide models for World Bank client countries currentlydeveloping institutions for managing urban transportproblems. The best method for understanding how each ofthese systems operates is consulting the county case studiesprovided in the final section. This study is organized asfollows. The first section presents an overview of severalthemes that run through the cases. In the subsequentsections, each case is reviewed individually.