2016 - Towards Sustainable Urban Transport Finance

Delivering quality municipal services and urban transport with limited fiscal resources remains a key challenge for city governments, one that is becoming ever more acute in the developing world. The last two decades have seen a major change in the global landscape of urban transport finance. Governments should enable the market and private sector to provide urban transport infrastructure and services wherever possible, and focus public funds on those areas that are hard for the market alone to get at. The most sustainable source of finance for urban transport capital investment is arguably long-term debt financing, and cities should make it a central task to establish and improve their creditworthiness. They must also anticipate an upward shift of maintenance expenditures relative to capital investments.