Tracking Sustainable Mobility in Asia-Pacific Cities 2022

For many decades, cities in the Asia Pacific region have followed unsustainable patterns of transport development: worsening congestion and traffic safety, deteriorating air quality, high consumption of fossil fuels, and rising greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, many city governments are now developing sustainable transport strategies to target these issues and promote more sustainable modes, such as public transport and non-motorized transport. To date, however, their efforts to design effective strategies have been thwarted by their limited capacity to collect and analyze data. The Sustainable Urban Transport Index (SUTI) was developed by ESCAP to address this gap. The SUTI is a tool that summarizes, tracks and compares the performance of cities in sustainable urban transport and related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SUTI is a composite index made up of ten indicators, each measuring different aspects of sustainable urban transport. In addition, the data which make up the SUTI can be collected by city officials at low cost and on a regular basis, thereby allowing them to continuously monitor their city’s performance over time. The main aim of this report is to demonstrate how SUTI can be used by policymakers to monitor progress towards sustainable urban mobility, as well as to identify those policies which will move urban transport systems towards sustainability. It contains the results of SUTI assessments conducted in 24 cities of the Asia and Pacific region between 2017 and 2021.