Transport motorisation

Nitrogen oxides are primarily produced when nitrogen and oxygen combine at high temperatures and pressures. Such conditions are reached in internal combustion engines (ICEs). Consequently, motorised transport modes - and in particular road vehicles - are major contributors to overall NOx emissions. This chapter deals with... 

Synthetic fuels will enable reconciling the necessity of reducing, in the short term, the issues of transportation and deployment of the alternative motorisations of vehicles. They will thus give time to the car industry to ensure the transition towards the electrical vehicle, which is, by far, more energy efficient than the thermal vehicle running on synfuels. 

Because of the rapid economic growth, motorisation and urbanisation in developing nations are growing very fast. These create a pressure on the transport infrastructure, which is not sufficient or ready to meet such an increase in the number of vehicles and people. The lack of institutional framework, appropriate engineering, education, and law enforcement are important explanations for the severity of the safety problem in these countries. There is a need to bring together all the key departments, agencies and professionals in an effort to improve road safety in the country. 

In order to achieve good results in comparisons, we must compare countries at a similar level of motorisation and with a similar type of transport system. Comparing Laos with Singapore is less useful than comparing Laos with Cambodia where they have similar levels of motorcyclists and more in common with transport patterns. This conclusion was also reached by the study we made concerning the road safety perspective in Arab countries (A1 Haji Asp, 2001). 

It is interesting to reflect that the engineering for water distribution, sanitation, electricity distribution, telecommunications, concrete construction, and motorised transport have all been imported into South Asia from industrialised societies. Among these, mobile telecommunications stands out as an extraordinary success, not only in South Asia but also in every other developing country. 

Databases (ECMT, Eurostat, FAO, IRF, IRTAD, OECD, TI, UN, WB, WHO) and a number of other sources provided empirical fatahty data as well as data from 61 countries. Broken by the different years, they covered geography, demography, economy, social issues, motorisation, roads and transport. For the purposes of the CSPF, the number of countries was narrowed down to 22. The set included countries with sohd road deaths statistics and ones that did not record any major changes in the RFR over time. The countries selected (such as Australia, France, Japan, Netherlands and Sweden) have similar RFR. The underlying data come from the period between 1922 and 2010 and cover 983 country-years. 

As mentioned before, by adding a second independent variable to the RFR models (marked 2 and 3), we can significantly improve the quality of the models. Of the other independent variables, transport variables have a significant effect. They are average vehicle kilometre travelled per capita AVTKPC and motorisation rate relative to motor vehicles MRMV which also represent the mobility of the country s population. The quality of the models can be improved by using AVTKPC. Because this variable may be difficult to estimate for some countries it can be replaced with MRMV. 

Concerned that more than 90% of road traffic deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries and that in these countries the most vulnerable are pedestrians, cyclists, users of motorised two- and three-wheelers and passengers on unsafe public transport,... 

The United States is one of very few countries that still use a transport safety measure as its primary measure of progress in traffic safety. One commonly reads, in most official publications out of the United States, that the per mile fatality rate is at its historically lowest point, yet its progress in traffic safety lags far behind that of most Western motorised nations. Table 3.2 compares, over a 40-year span, progress... 

To start with, we need to explore just where personal motorised transport fits in modern Western society, and that is where we now turn our attention. 

Crashes were predominantly seen by both the public and the responsible authorities as inevitable and unavoidable chance phenomena, and they were considered the price of progress. As they were thought to be unavoidable, little could be done to prevent their occurrence. While transport engineering institutions were emerging, there was no scientific base for them to draw from they had to come to grips with the previously unknown phenomenon of rapidly growing personal motorised mobility. 

There is a glimmer of hope. The World Health Organisation (WHO) undertook a study of public health issues and forecast that road trauma would rapidly climb to a position of prominence globally as some of the most heavily populated nations motorise. Through the United Nations this has led to a declaration of a Decade of Action, which is being led by the WHO (see Chapter 3 for details). How health worics with transport to give effect to the ambitions of the UN resolution remains to be seen. 

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