C40 Cities Protecting the Mass Transit

On 31 March 2021, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group – a group of 97 cities around the world – came together to demand historic levels of investment in public transport to ensure a green and just recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Underpinning this campaign was research carried out over a period of just two months by WSP’s team in Canada, which provided a solid evidence base to support the mayors of these cities in arguing for an injection of funds by national governments into their mass transit infrastructure.

Revealing the opportunities

Our report has demonstrated that proper investment in public transport could reduce air pollution from transport by up to 45% in some cities – helping the world meet the goal of the 2016 Paris Agreement to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5°C. Alongside this environmental impact are a host of interrelated benefits for public health, life expectancy and social justice, including the potential to create 4.6 million additional jobs across 100 cities by 2030. We’ve also shown the devastating implications of failing to support mass transit, which could put the world on track to heat up by more than 3°C.

Aside from the short timescale for producing this report, our central challenge was that, while a lot of data exists about mass transit in various contexts, there is no clear methodology for tying all this together and analyzing it in a way that takes into account the ever-changing nature of cities and the environment. We were selected for our ability to be adaptable and flexible, to quickly synthesize the vast amounts of information, and to develop a way of analyzing and presenting this data in a way that’s accessible to a global and diverse audience.

A moving target

Our work centered, first, on validating the existing model cities have been using to calculate emissions and the actions they needed to take to meet the Paris Agreement target. We examined the underlying assumptions of these models and then outlined a variety of future scenarios, with differing levels of investment and population growth, and changes in land use over time. We also tried to create a picture of how people’s use of public transport is likely to shift, depending on the speed of the COVID-19 vaccination rollout program and the general perception of risk. At the same time, we developed a classification system for cities that recognizes their differences, based on measures such as GDP per capita and the level of car dependency. A final, crucial, element of the project was to look at the impact of funding mass transit on vulnerable and marginalized groups, including low-income communities, women, people of color, and disabled people.

The overall idea was to demonstrate the catastrophic repercussions of decreasing investment in public transport and the huge gains that are possible for society as a whole if it is supported. As the pandemic draws to a close, we hope that our research will help cities across the world to move towards a more sustainable and equitable future.