LAND TRANSPORT SERVICES-Part 02

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(a)        Passenger transport

4.                  The principal means of passenger transport by road is still the car with 53 per cent of the 25,000 billion passenger/kilometres of motorized journeys completed throughout the world in 1995.  However, to a very large extent, the GATS does not apply to this type of transport which mainly involves individuals travelling on their own account in their own vehicle.  Only taxis are covered by the GATS, and there are no world statistics that would make it possible to isolate their share which, however, must be very small.

5.                  The rest of passenger transport at world level is distributed as follows:  4 per cent for two-wheel traffic and the like (here again, mainly on a private basis, with the marginal exception of vehicles such as rickshaws), 24 per cent for buses and coaches, 8 per cent for the railways (already dealt with), 0.8 per cent for trams and subways (already dealt with as far as the latter is concerned), 10 per cent for air transport, and 0.4 per cent for water transport.  Measured in passenger/kilometres, 60 per cent of motorized transport takes place in the developed countries (including 20 per cent in the European Union)[1], since the number of kilometres travelled increases with the level of development.  The modal distribution of motorized transport also varies considerably with the level of development:  thus, in the developed countries the share taken by cars is approximately 80 per cent.

6.                  Altogether, then, road passenger transport represents about 25 to 30 per cent of world passenger transport consisting of the 24 per cent accounted for by buses and coaches, the tramways' share of the tram and subway item, and the indeterminate but small share corresponding to individual vehicle and two-wheel transport.

7.                  The geographical breakdown of the millions of passenger/kilometres travelled in buses and coaches (urban and interurban) gives some idea of the relative importance of markets:  out of a total of 6,000 billion passenger/kilometres travelled, 460 (7.6 per cent) were travelled in China, 360 (6 per cent) in the European Community, 230 (3.8 per cent) in the United States, 120 (2 per cent) in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, 100 (1.6 per cent) in Japan, and 4,730 (79 per cent) in the rest of the world.[2]

8.                  Again, these aggregates are of only relative significance since the urban bus regulatory and economic regime, characterized by public service concerns, often by public or subsidized operation and by competition from taxis, trams and subways, is generally very different from that of the interurban coaches, which are usually privately operated and generally profitable, compete with the railways and airlines, and include an international dimension.

i)                    Urban passenger transport

9.                  Some indication of the potential market is given by the steady long-term increase in the world's urban population, in both absolute and relative terms.  It was 735 million in 1950 (29.5 per cent of the total), 2 billion in 1985 (39.9 per cent of the total), and it is projected that it will have risen to 2.95 billion (48.2 per cent of the total) by the year 2000.  In 1989, there were 270 cities or conurbations with more than 1 million inhabitants worldwide, including 11 with more than 10 million inhabitants, eight of them in developing countries.  In addition, it was forecast that by the year 2000 there would be 16 cities with more than 12 million inhabitants in the developing countries.  In 1985, 60 per cent of the urban population was living in developing countries and 40 per cent in developed countries, exactly the opposite of the 1950 distribution.  Since then this trend has continued to strengthen.  The demand for urban transport has kept pace with this growth and even outstripped it, since distances and particularly journey times increase considerably as cities develop.

10.                  The distribution of the demand among the various means of transport:  private car, taxi, bus, tram and subway is extremely variable and depends on such factors as the level of development (as far as private cars are concerned), congestion, the existence or non-existence of a subway network (only 93 cities have subways[3]) or a tramway system (350 cities[4]), the number of buses and their condition, the existence or non-existence of dedicated lanes, the fares charged, the feeder networks, etc.  The following table, taken from a World Bank study[5], gives an indication of this breakdown for a number of representative cities:

Source:    Alan Armstrong Wright, "Urban Transit System:  Guidelines for Examining Options", World Bank technical paper, No. 52, May 1986.

11.                  For what this average is worth, worldwide transport capacity can be broken down as follows:[6]

12.                  This table lists two types of taxis:  individual taxis which constitute a luxury mode of urban transport by reason of their flexibility and comfort, and shared taxis, very common in developing countries, which carry between four and ten people on predetermined routes at fares competitive with or even cheaper than bus fares and help to make good the shortcomings of an overloaded bus system.  This applies to the "jeepneys" in the Philippines, the "sergentos" in Ethiopia, the "mammy wagons" in Ghana, the "dolums" in Turkey, etc.  These shared taxis may account for up to 30 per cent of the traffic or even more (80 per cent in Addis Ababa). These differences apart, the regulatory regime for taxis is fairly similar all over the world with a licensing and quota system, which sometimes gives rise to a grey market for licences, and some control over fares.