World Sustainable Transport Day recognises the vital role of transport worldwide in supporting sustainable development. This awareness day promotes safety, accessibility, affordability, efficiency and transport’s vital contribution to areas such as economic and social growth, environmental protection and trade. 

We’re using this day to highlight some of our members’ achievements in this vital area through using our four-pronged approach of independent review, and use of infrastructure data, multistakeholder working and social accountability. 

Africa
Uganda has worked hard to highlight the value of data publication. Not only has this led to an increase in data publication, but also resulted in organisations that never published data, such as the Roads Authority, going on to play a leading role in the proactive and reactive publication of data. 

In Malawi, their work led to improvements in the construction of a vital six lane motorway that connects key areas, including parliament. This project – which reduces travel time from 60 minutes to 10 minutes, and includes a cycle lane and pedestrian walkway – posed health and safety and wastage risks during construction. After training civil society organisations, the Roads Authority and Ministry of Transport and Public Works developed a plan to reduce these risks while using excess materials to produce school desks. More detail about their work can be found in this impact story

Asia
Indonesia: The foundations of both Nusa Tenggara Barat’s (NTB) and West Lombok’s memberships comes from its work in transport. Initially, West Lombok and NTB piloted a Provincial Road Improvement and Maintenance programme, which built CoST data standards into the programme. 

In NTB, they also began their multi-stakeholder approach through working with the Road Traffic and Transport Forum (RTTF) to encourage and foster relationships with the private sector, government, academia, media and traffic police. The RTTF now hosts CoST NTB’s membership, meanwhile, West Lombok is also hosted by a transport organisation – the Road Transport and Traffic Forum. Both members have the Head of the Transportation Agency as their CoST Champion. 

With the development of regional road infrastructure being a key area to the country, the Indonesian members have since gone on to drive capacity-building through training dozens of people, creating a data portal to support access to information for residents and encouraging data publication through decrees. 

Across their programmes, Indonesian members have covered 7000km+ of road projects.  

In Thailand, they have saved millions of dollars, including through methods such as ensuring citizen complaints were considered in highway designs to reduce flooding risks, improving streetlights on roads, working with communities to develop, and better promote traffic routes when there are diversions because of construction works and installing barriers around construction sights. 

Latin America
Bogota played a fundamental role in the development of the City’s first metro line, valued at US$5.2bn. The initial phases of this megaproject was published on their data platform, which has helped to highlight key pieces of information, like the number of jobs created from infrastructure investments. Through their work, they have also gained vital support from the City Mayor. 

In Guatemala, using independent review processes led to savings of $5 million for a Bridge contract, where lack of bidding processes and fair competition was exposed, and a 64% increase in data publication on a road project. It also helped to highlight issues across road projects including increase in project costs without scrutiny. Exposing these issues led to legal reforms, and praise from the Roads Directorate about the improvement in project delivery. These projects have been critical for communities to access vital markets and healthcare. 

Former members, such as Honduras and Ukraine also made significant progress in sector to  reduce corruption, increase data publication and improve financial management and governance practices. The impact of this has been increased road safety and quality, executive degrees being issued and data publication and open bidding significantly increasing.