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) is a tool to summarize, track and compare the performance of cities in sustainable urban transport and related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly target 11.2 on access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all by 2030. The SUTI is a composite index made up of ten indicators, each measuring different aspects of sustainable urban transport.
This publication contains summary of the results of SUTI assessments conducted in 24 cities of the Asia and Pacific region between 2017 and 2021. The main aim of this publication 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.