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# **_2.4.4 Geography_**

Transport costs are partially determined by geography. The distance between the origin and destination points of a transport journey affects the variable cost of shipping in the form of fuel, wear and tear of vehicles, and the amount of time goods are traveling.

_<u>Limao and Venables (1999) Working Paper on Infrastructure, Geographical Disadvantage, and Transport Costs</u>_ includes the shipping company quotes for the cost of shipping a standard container from Baltimore to select destinations. While this measures reflects the true cost of a homogenous good, and provides the city of origin, landfall and destination; the charges can be effected by specific routes, frequencies etc.

_-_ _<u>UN Center for Human Settlements (UN Habitat) Global Urban Indicators Database</u>_ The Global Urban Indicators Database maintained by UN-Habitat provides statistical information on cities throughout the world, from 1993 and 2001. It contains a set of 23 key indicators and nine lists of qualitative data. It covers urban poverty, urban human development, city investment potential, urban environment, urban governance and overall quality of urban life. Two transport indicators are included under urban environment. These are “travel time” (average time in minutes for a one-way work trip, which is formed as an average over all modes of transport) and Transport modes to work (percentage of work trips undertaken by a certain mode). It is available on the web.

Indicators provide a comprehensive picture of cities, which, with other indicators which may be chosen by countries, will provide a quantitative, comparative base for the condition of cities, and show progress towards achieving urban objectives.

Key indicators are both important for policy and relatively easy to collect. They are either numbers, percentages and ratios; Qualitative data or checklists, which give an assessment of areas which cannot easily be measured quantitatively. They are audit questions generally accompanied of checkboxes for yes or no answers.

_UITP, International Association of Public Transport (IAPT) Millennium Cities Database --_ _<u>Mobility In Cities Database</u>_ The International Association of Public Transport has compiled a database of 100 of the world’s cities, known as the _Millennium Cities Database for Sustainable Transport_ . The collected data looks at population, the economy and urban structure, the number of road vehicles, taxis, the road network, parking, public transport networks (offer, usage and cost), individual mobility and choice of transport mode, transport system efficiency and environmental impact (duration and cost of transport, energy consumption, accidents, pollution, etc.). In total, over 200 indicators have been collected for each of the 100 cities for the year 1995.

Indicators per city, statistical analyses and recommendations have been compiled onto CD-ROM available form UITP.

The UITP will publish in October 2005 the results of the Mobility in Cities Database project, __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 32