Controlled Public Transport Fares in the Developing World: Help or Hindrance to the Urban Poor?

Institute of Transportation Engineers. ITE Journal, Jun 2005 by Thompson, John E, Nagayama, Katsuhide

Therefore, for low-income groups, access to health and education facilities by other members of the household would need to be rationed.9 In determining affordability for public transport services, the maxim "where more than 10 percent of households spend more than 15 percent of household income on work journeys" often is adopted as identifying situations in which the poor are discriminated against.10 Cairo would appear to be such a case.

The urban poor make fewer trips that are of a shorter lengdi than more affluent Cairenes. This can be seen in two test case neighborhoods. Masr Al-Gadeeda, a highincome precinct containing 43,000 households, generates 430,800 daily motorized trips, of which about 80 percent are external to the neighborhood. Conversely, the low-income Monshaet Nasr neighborhood, which contains 36,300 households, generates only 152,400 daily trips, of which 55 percent remain within the neighborhood (see Figure 5).

In Cairo, this implies a low-mobility clustering of the urban poor in their areas or in spontaneous, informal settlements near centers of activity. Pendakur states on this topic that such patterns: "...contribute to social inequalities, chiefly through limited access to jobs by the urban poor as well as proportionately higher transport costs and time spent traveling."11

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Findings regarding the status of the current public transport system and travel patterns of the urban poor raise important issues and concerns.

* Fare levels in the formal public transport sector are not merely controlled; they are virtually frozen, ostensibly for the benefit of poorer Cairenes. Although some segments of the population undoubtedly have benefited from this, parallel problems have arisen. In particular, formal bus operations yield insufficient cash flow to allow upgrading of services and fleet renewal. Concurrently, operations and maintenance cannot be fulfilled adequately with stagnant revenue sources. The effects of such policies are clearly manifested in the deteriorating quality of formal bus services provided in Cairo.

* One might argue that frozen fares have indeed hurt, not benefited, certain segments of the poor. Reduced (or infrequent) formal bus services (catalyzed by the constrained income of the operator) imply increasing reliance on more expensive shared taxi (microbus) services. The urban poor in more outlying precincts also are more likely to require modal interchanges that can be expensive and time consuming given a lack of service coordination. This tends to ration access to jobs and other urban amenities by the poor.

* The argument that the urban poor are socially disadvantaged is undoubtedly valid, and some form of transport-focused government assistance or support is likely warranted. One point relates to the type of support; for example, the adoption of more practical ways to provide subsidies directly to the poor (as opposed to the operator) rather than freezing public transport fares in general at unrealistically low levels (from the operations perspective).