Quantifying Direct Public Costs and Externalities for a Just and Sustainable Urban Transport

Abstract

The quest for a just and sustainable urban transport requires a better understanding of the use of public resources and the impact of transport systems. In the global south we know little about how much a city spends on transport provision and to what extent the movement of passengers and freight affects society. We developed a method to assess how much and how well a Brazilian city invests in different transport systems. We also estimated the costs of some of the main externalities generated by passenger and freight transport. We found that: (i) the parcel of the city budget allocated to private motorised transport exceeds that allocated to public transport by more than 15 times; (ii) spending on transport systems in 2020, during the first year of COVID19 in Brazil, was atypical, as public transport needed to receive significant contributions from city budgets; (iii) private motorised transport, responsible for the largest part of externalities costs, consumes the largest part of the city transport budget; (iv) the city spends a yearly amount between 200 and 255 euros per private motorized vehicle of the circulating fleet; (v) freight transport has externalities costs of more than 3 times that of public passenger transport; (vi) cycling and walking, which account for around a quarter of trips and that contribute the least with externalities, receive a negligible share of the transport budget.