By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. To thrive, they will need efficient and sustainable forms of transport, but to achieve this, the financial incentives guiding urban transport operation must change – and change rapidly.

Urban transport plays a critical role in determining the social, environmental and economic shape of cities. Improving Urban Access: New Approaches to Funding Transport Investment provide innovative ideas on how we might reorganize transport finance to ensure that it is suited to serving the social, environmental and economic principles that must guide future urban living. Continuing the work begun by its predecessor, Urban Access for the 21st Century, the authors assess the complexity of implementing new finance approaches and suggest ways to make positive and radical changes. Although the range of revenue raising options remain limited to users, indirect beneficiaries, and the general public, these can be recast to transform the way transport is paid for and therefore how its services are delivered.

New finance models only succeed when they are intrinsically linked to the economic, social, cultural and political forces that create urban life. Together these volumes provide a starting point for the deeper research and policy design needed to successfully create urban transport finance systems that can address the challenges that 21st century cities present.

1. Sustainability and Social Inclusion: The complexity of financing urban access –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth 2. A Field Guide to the Challenge of Financing Urban Access –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth 3. Shaping Rapidly Growing Chinese Cities: Lessons in the behavioural impacts of transport finance choices –Jinhua Zhao & David Block-Schachter 4. The Social Meaning of "Access"; Lessons in transport governance from cities in developed counties –Jago Dodson, Matthew Burke, Neil Sipe and Anthony Perl 5. Mobility and Access when Formal Markets Do Not Exist: Lessons from cities in developing countries –Julien Allaire, Pablo Salazar Ferro, Bernard Abeiku Arthur, and Jean-Claude Ziv 6. Lessons from Economics: Mechanisms for financing mobility –Kenneth Gwilliam 7. Value Capture: Why we may be disappointed –Lauren Fischer and Elliott Sclar 8. Why Can’t Urban Transport Behave Like Other Public Services? Explorations in public utility regulation –Andrea Rizvi 9. Measuring Access not Mobility: A technical challenge –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth 10. Practical Approaches to Measuring Access and Social Inclusion: Lessons from Lisbon –José Viegas, and Luís Martínez 11. Access and Social Complexity: Identifying and managing access requirements across social groups and across the world –Antonio Páez 12. What is Past is Prologue: Stepping into the future –Elliott Sclar and Måns Lönnroth