Urban transport and poverty alleviation

Poverty is generally viewed as predominantly rural phenomenon in all the developing countries in general and India in particular. In fact because of very high rate of urbanisation, it is estimated that about half of the absolute poor in the World live in towns and cities. Urban transport plays a very important and critical role in promoting economic growth and quality of life. Urban transport needs to be widely recognised as important requirement for sustained economic growth and poverty alleviation. Adequate and reasonable priced urban transport can help in alleviating poverty from urban areas to a large extent. In the present paper an attempt has been made to analyse urban poverty alleviation through urban transport planning. With the increase in number of personalised vehicles, lot of attention is being given to the road capacity augmentation measures including road widening, flyovers, etc. In Transport Planning pedestrian safety needs are generally ignored/sacrificed to planning for faster flow of vehicles.