Cities look to public transport as ticket to reduce pollution

By Elisabeth Jeffries

Date: 08/07/04

"KRAKOW In Your Pocket", an internet tourist guide to the Polish city, boasts wryly that "the roads are bad, the vodka cheap, the service often sour you'll love it".

Residents might actually be flattered by the rude remarks about the roads: historically Krakow, Poland's academic, liturgical and cultural centre, has set great store by its public transport.

According to the city council's research, more than 60% of all trips are made by public transport, the same proportion as in 1994, if slightly down on the 1980s when the figure was around 70%. The western European average is 20-25% of trips.

In Krakow there are 220 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, in Germany there are 700 cars per 1,000.

Krakow is currently negotiating for funding from the European Commission's Civitas II initiative, part of the EU's 6th Framework Programme for Research, aimed at developing clean urban transport.

Civitas I was designed to help ambitious cities introduce and test innovative measures for improving urban transport. Civitas II is aimed at central and eastern European cities, as well as cities from the "old" EU-15, candidate countries Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia, plus non-EU states such as Norway, Israel and Switzerland.

The first wave of funding - under Civitas I - saw then-candidate country the Czech Republic receive funding for its capital, Prague.

The Commission has set aside a maximum of l50 million for Civitas II. Further funding comes from the public and private partners within each consortium bidding for funds, municipalities, public transport operators, private companies and research institutes.

Six cities from central and eastern Europe have been selected and are currently negotiating their work programme. As well as Krakow, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Debrecen (Hungary), Ploiesti and Suceava (Romania) and Tallinn (Estonia), will be beneficiaries.

Special circumstances in Krakow probably help the city to maintain such a high use of public transport. It has a large student population and the historic centre is car-free.

But, as with the rest of Poland, there is pressure for greater car-ownership. "It's a childhood dream for many people in Poland to have a car; for the older generation, it was not possible to buy one," admits Janina Pokrywa, head of transport systems at the city council.

In Krakow, the funding will be used to introduce compressed natural gas, CNG, into its buses and to buy new buses as part of a more comprehensive long-term scheme funded on a national basis. The plan is also to teach the young about the benefits of public transport.

Although Ljubljana is similarly an ancient and fragile city, its starting point for public transport use is very different.

The split between private vehicles and public transport is reversed, 80/20 in favour of private cars (compared to 50/50 in 1977 and 66/34 in 1994). With a population of around a quarter of a million, the city is three times smaller than Krakow (800,000) and has a high population density of around 27,000 people living in an area of five square kilometres. The city council reports problems of "low travel speed of city buses and more than 110,000 daily commuters from other municipalities".

City council representative Zdenka Simonovic says much of the money will be used to introduce biodiesels to existing engines; buses are able to take a certain proportion of biofuels without needing any adjustments.

Plans to introduce CNG are also in the pipeline, but in this city the focus is on biofuels, in line with both national and EU policy. In the case of biofuels, Simonovic says that the project will add value "by seeing if we can go beyond 5% biodiesel content and assess how the engines react".

EU data show the Ljubljana experience is typical. European Commission trend statistics indicate that car use is growing far faster than other modes of transport.

In the old EU-15, there has been a 17% increase in passenger car usage between 1991-2001 compared to 11% growth in trains use and 8-9% for tram, metro and buses over the same period.

While shifting people on to public transport may be a worthy long-term goal, in the meantime policymakers believe that increasing the use of biofuels will be a swifter way of reducing air pollution.

• Elisabeth Jeffries is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/energy_transport/en/cut_en/cut_civitas_en.html http://ec.europa.eu/comm/energy_transport/en/cut_en/cut_civitas_en.html

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