AMMAN —
Jordanian families spend an average of 17
percent of their income on transportation, while the average round trip time is
2.5 hours, a World Bank diagnostic study for public transportation in Jordan
that was issued on Tuesday, revealed, according to Al-Mamlaka TV.
اضافة اعلان
The study added that the estimated cost incurred by Jordan as a result
of deficiencies related to public transportation amounted to about $3 billion
annually, or at least 6 percent of the country’s
GDP, without calculating its
impact on women’s participation in the labor force.
As for young
people, 78 percent of graduates believe that the inefficiency of transportation
is an obstacle to accessing jobs, and young people spend about 23 percent of
their income on transportation, and the percentage could rise to 46 percent in
some regions.
Regional
Director of the Mashreq Department at the World Bank
Saroj Kumar Jha, said on
Tuesday that women in the countries of the Middle East are unable to fully
contribute to the economic development of their countries due to the obstacles
they face in transportation systems.
He added, during
a session organized by the bank in Amman on improving gender-responsive public
transportation, with the participation of Minister of Transport
Wajih Azaizeh,
that “people’s inability to feel sufficiently safe when using public
transportation and the high costs of other transportation means limiting their
ability to engage in work.”
The study
indicated that “the transportation system in Jordan suffers from low-quality
infrastructure and facilities, low standards for vehicle maintenance and
safety, in addition to the lack of considerations related to gender or people
with disabilities.”
It added that Jordan faces additional major
challenges, which are “fragmented institutional settings and processes,
insufficient, and imbalanced service provision, poor coverage of the public
transport network, no integration between public transport service and fare,
and a lack of information for users about routes, parking, appointments, and
arrival and departure times.”
The study showed
that public transportation in Jordan is unreliable, ineffective, and unsafe.
But while 64 percent of users are satisfied with the public transportation
system, 34 percent of women are not satisfied, and 18 percent are not satisfied
at all.
Moreover, the high demand was not adequately met by
improving the quality of public transport, which led to a decrease in the
number of passengers and a shift to the use of private vehicles. It is
estimated that greenhouse gas emissions from the Jordanian transportation
sector have increased to more than 11,000 gigagrams of CO2 per year over the
same time period, costing the economy between $500–1,000 million annually.
In the study, the World Bank confirmed that public
transportation in Jordan represents a low percentage of modes, amounting to 13
percent. It is divided into private vehicles (33 percent), on foot (26
percent), mass transportation (13 percent), and taxis (9 percent), other (19
percent).
From 2008 to 2018, the study added that “private
vehicles had increased by 93.5 percent, while public transportation vehicles
increased by only 44.7 percent.”
Deficiencies related to transportation affect
economic performance, with high annual costs, distributed over (traffic congestions
JD1.5 billion, deaths and injuries as a result of traffic accidents JD296
million, environmental degradation JD143 to JD332 million, and noise pollution
JD160 to JD54 million, according to the
study, which called for improving access to services such as hospitals and
colleges.
Jah explained that “the cost of enrolling children
in nurseries is one of the obstacles that reduce women’s economic participation
in the labor market, in addition to another factor represented in men’s
unwillingness to allow women to work, which weakens any real development in the
economy.” He called for support for women’s economic participation.
He also called for finding short, long-term and
emergency solutions to help women who wish to join the labor market and provide
safety in means of transportation.
“It is not possible to achieve an economic vision
without raising the economic participation of women in Jordan, which has
reached 14 percent,” according to Jah, who confirmed that the World Bank
continues to provide the necessary assistance to develop public transportation
in the countries of the region.
He pointed out that the bank supports an organized
approach to solve problems related to public transportation in Jordan through
coordination between institutions to create conditions that allow women to
access work, and the best evidence of this is the work to support the rapid
transit bus system.
The bank
recommended standardizing buses, establishing a fund to buy back public
transport licenses, integrating tariffs and operations, and adopting a national
road safety plan.
It called for the implementation of smart transportation
systems including open ticket protocol, fleet management and user information,
a traffic demand management program including parking management, restricting
the use of private cars, and imposing congestion fees, supporting a national
road safety plan, pedestrian and cycling plans, and urban development.
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