High Volume Transport

Vital transport research to ensure accessible, affordable and climate friendly transport for all.

How will the UK-funded High Volume Transport programme update urban transport research in Africa and South Asia?

In this blog post, Holger Dalkmann, Urban Theme Lead for the UK-funded High Volume Transport (HVT) programme, highlights the role that HVT will play in updating transport research across Africa and south Asia. Holger has 20+ years of experience in 40+ countries in the fields of transport, cities, sustainability and climate change.

Sustainable mobility, which applies to all people, goods and services, is important for the future of our planet, enabling all citizens in the global South and North to improve their quality of life. This can be achieved only when we collectively start paying more attention to walking, cycling, public transport, and shared modes of transport. High Volume Transport is an important investment to continue to improve the quality of life for people worldwide. That excites me and drives my whole career.

Looking at the Urban theme: we currently have an urbanisation rate of roughly 40% in Asia, with a similar scale in Africa, and we can expect an additional 800 million citizens in these parts of the world to soon be born or move to urban conglomerations. Sustainable mobility will make or break the future economies in those countries.

As long as we keep the old models that are car-orientated rather than people-orientated, cities will lose in the long run, and so will citizens.

With High Volume Transport, we are looking for lessons learned in order to create and recreate cities that are liveable and are powerhouses for economic growth. I am very excited that the UK Department for International Development is paying close attention to the theme of urbanisation, acknowledging the current major drivers of change, and seeing the need to bridge the gap between research, enabling frameworks and policies, and ground-level action.

At the moment, across Africa and south Asia, we still see very traditional conservative perceptions of road engineering, education, planning, and architecture. As long as we keep the old models that are car-oriented rather than people-orientated, cities will lose in the long run, and so will citizens. In the past in European countries and in the US, we have seen in that car-orientated development leads to more fatalities, more congestion, more pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions and less accessibility for all.

A programme like High Volume Transport is desperately needed to bridge the research-action gap and bring in a new way of thinking; working closely with local and national governments, civil society organisations, and businesses to bring change. The programme has the potential to contribute to the paradigm shift that can improve the lives of many in the global South.

‘Urban’ theme within High Volume Transport

The High Volume Transport programme comprises four themes:

I lead the Urban theme, looking at holistic solutions that result in shorter trips, less trips, safer and more accessible walking and cycling public transport solutions, new mobility solutions that enable transport to become safer and more affordable, improve vehicles’ fuel efficiency to make them cleaner and safer, and a prominent role for new data technologies. Or, in short: AVOID-SHIFT-IMPROVE.

Within the Urban theme, we are working with well-respected specialists, bringing their knowledge into upcoming ‘State of Knowledge’ reports that the High Volume Transport programme will commission. Their expertise will help us to create a roadmap into the second phase of the programme, when we try to bring research into action in Africa and south Asia.

For High Volume Transport to work, it is important that the four themes cooperate. For instance, a true sustainable urban solution is also low-carbon, also considers social inclusion, gender, and poverty. We need to make sure sure that knowledge and research is pulled together.

Similarly, when we talk about sustainable mobility on the decision-making level, the planners need to work, for instance, transport departments, planning, finance and social departments so there is integrated thinking on national, city, and business levels. We need to reflect this need for shared thinking in our programme as a model.

One fascinating challenge is the collection of existing transport research knowledge in Africa and south Asia. This knowledge is often not published in standard journals, and it often exists instead as what is known as grey literature, often in different languages. French and Portuguese play a key role in Africa, for instance. How can we ensure that all this knowledge is accessible?

Anticipated longer-term impacts

In the longer term, Africa and south Asia will need trillions of pounds of investment in the right infrastructure in order to achieve the change that we are aiming for. So, for a £15m investment like High Volume Transport applied research, we need to think carefully about how the programme’s transport research can support the bigger picture.

We need to create a programme that scales knowledge, research and the ability to create more sustainable networks, infrastructure and operations, and we need to link these to enabling frameworks for policy and regulation. I personally want to see High Volume Transport working alongside many partners to bring change in education and knowledge, combined with a strong policy dialogue and finance dialogue that enables change in these countries.

High Volume Transport will have the chance to get on the ground to put research into practice. For the Urban theme, the question is how to really integrate urban transport and urban planning so that they are not just theories but actual enablers of regulation.

The same goes for the integration of mobility services. For instance, the vast majority of people are walking — how to make walking safer? How do we make paratransit (matatues, tuk-tuks/ trotters etc.) safer, and how do we combine them with high quality mass transit to enable greater access? These are the big questions that need to consider both the higher-level political economy and also on-the-ground specifics.

A new competition to stimulate transport research innovation

High Volume Transport recently launched the Transport-Technology Research Innovation for International Development (T-TRIID) funding competition. I am very excited to see a funding challenge that gives civil society, research organisations, and other stakeholders an opportunity for initial investment in existing research that can provide new innovative scalable transport solutions.

The T-TRIID competition is also an invitation for all of us to think about how data technologies can make the streetscape and infrastructure much safer, and how we can contribute to improvements in public transport, walking, cycling in a safe and low-carbon manner. We have seen solutions work in other parts of the world such as bike-sharing and ride-hailing, so it is exciting to see the T-TRIID competition provide initial funds that can then be further scaled, which will be part of the second phase. I hope we see many applications, and I hope those lead to many stories that we capture during this journey.

Upcoming challenges for the HVT programme

One fascinating challenge is the collection of existing transport research knowledge in Africa and south Asia. This knowledge is often not published in standard journals, and it often exists instead as what is known as grey literature, often in different languages. French and Portuguese play a key role in Africa, for instance. How can we ensure that all this knowledge is accessible?

A second challenge is to bring the state of knowledge back to the people whom it belongs to. High Volume Transport is about linking research to decision-makers, which is not just the research community but also civil society, policymakers. Here, communications plays a key role.

The third challenge is for the programme’s second phase: how to enable the use of knowledge on the ground? Rather than focusing on what the North knows about the South, we aim to focus on what the South already knows, empowering leaders in the global South, and South-South cooperation.

There are other players in the transport research space, which is very exciting, but also requires coordination with other organisations such as the German technical Cooperation (GIZ), other EU country aid programmes like the EU, France, The Netherlands, and global initiatives like Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport (SLoCat).

Existing networks, cross-learning, and stories

For these challenges, we need to build a stronger network, work off existing networks in Africa and south Asia, and use existing communication channels. We will need to develop research/knowledge products that are alternatives to peer-reviewed papers so that they are more like guidance notes, and we will need to identify stakeholders that we can provide with sufficient resources to enable South-South dialogue. In India, for example there’s a lot to learn, both positive and negative, that might work in Africa.

We will also need to start constructing a longer-term narrative. If, in the future, we are asked about our successes and what we achieved over these five years, then stories are vital. Yes, we need stories from the ground, but we also need evidence of what works on a scaling level. Finding those stories at both ground level and higher level is going to be very important.

Holger Dalkmann has 20+ years of experience in the fields of transport, cities, sustainability and climate change. He has worked in 40+ countries on sustainable solutions. Holger was former Director at the World Resources Institute, leading the sustainable mobility programme, where he worked on solutions on the ground and scaling them up to national policies and international agreements.