Abstract

The Tool for Rapid Assessment of City Energy (TRACE) is used for conducting rapid assessments of energy use in cities. It helps prioritize sectors with significant energy savings potential, and identifies appropriate energy efficiency interventions across six sectors-transport, municipal buildings, water and waste water, public lighting, solid waste, and power and heat. It is a simple, low-cost, user-friendly, and practical tool that can be applied in any socioeconomic setting. While this work focuses on the growth poles in Romania, the analysis was limited to the boundary of the center city of Brasov, due to the difficulty of collecting individual indicators for all the constituent localities of a metropolitan area. The report details the analysis carried out and the recommendations derived as a result, for district heating maintenance and upgrade, non-motorized transport, public transport development, parking restraint measures, municipal buildings audit and retrofit, street lighting timing program, and active leakage of water and pressure management. Document type: Book

Abstract

Developed at the request of the Mexican G20 Presidency for consideration by the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors at the G20 Leaders' Summit in Mexico, and jointly prepared with the Asian Development Bank, this policy paper positioned green transport in the context of cities development. Urban transport determines the shape of a city and its ecological footprint. Many cities in low and middle income countries are at a crossroads. Policy decisions taken now, while car use is still relatively low and cities retain a relatively transit friendly, compact urban form, will affect how people will live in their cities for many decades into the future. A new paradigm of urban transport can be part of the solution to reversing the deteriorating situation in some cities of developing countries, and supporting others to embark on a sustainable, low carbon, green growth path: developing a city for people rather than cars, and including public and mass transport as a major component of the modal structure. Implementing such a new paradigm can be truly transformational. This joint World Bank and Asian Development Bank paper lays out six aspects, which are most difficult to align, yet, are critical to ensure the sustainability of urban transport systems, visionary leadership, integrated strategy for land use and urban transport, coordination among agencies, domestic capacity, adequate cost recovery, and private participation in the operation and construction of urban transport systems. The paper proposes a set of new initiatives for G20 leaders' consideration, including the development of an umbrella toolkit to guide policy makers in charge of urban planning to make transport decisions best suited to their local contexts.

Abstract

This report provides a gender review of a decade and a half of World Bank infrastructure lending for 1,246 projects. The objective of this review is to assess the status of and trends in gender integration in the World Bank infrastructure portfolio, and to establish a baseline for monitoring and enhancing gender integration in line with commitments made for the 2006 gender action plan. The portfolio review reveals important progress on gender integration in infrastructure operations. While an average of 14 percent of infrastructure projects in 1995 applied some attention to gender concerns in 1995, this climbed to 36 percent by 2009. The global average, moreover, hides large strides made over time in four regions. In 2009, East Asia and the Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Africa all included gender concerns in the design of at least 50 percent of their infrastructure projects. Hard work remains in consolidating and extending the gains in gender coverage across the infrastructure portfolio. This will require stronger management commitment, concerted efforts, a plan with targets to achieve sustainable results, resources, specialist staffing, and capacity enhancement of staff. The portfolio review repeatedly found that supporting gender equality and women's empowerment in infrastructure operations have large benefits for the communities; the actions not only increased women's opportunities but also enhanced project effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, using both theoretical and numerical analysis, the impact of agglomeration externalities on short-run policy decisions in public transport, i.e. socially optimal pricing, frequency setting, and subsidisation. We develop a simple two-mode model in which commuters can opt for car or public transport use; car use leads to congestion, and public transport is subject to crowding. Allowing for agglomeration externalities, we show the following results. First, if car use is correctly priced for congestion, agglomeration benefits imply substantially lower public transport fares and higher frequencies. They neutralise to some extent the pressure to increase fares to correct the crowding externality. Second, as a consequence, agglomeration benefits justify low cost recovery ratios in public transport. Assuming an agglomeration elasticity of 1.04, a value well within the range of reported elasticities, numerical implementation of the model finds that cost-recovery ratios are 35.8% lower than in the absence of the productivity externality. Third, interestingly, the effect of agglomeration benefits on fares and frequency is much smaller if road use is exogenously under-priced. In this case, any modal shift induced by lower public transport fares has opposing agglomeration effects on the two modes, since agglomeration benefits are not mode-specific.