This section synthesizes briefly both the key indicators of sustainable transport in the parter cities as well as some of the results of the process in which we engaged them. The PSUTA encompasses three city partners in Asia – Hanoi (Viet Nam), Pune (India), and Xi’an (China).

These cities have many similarities and differences. Their populations lie between 2 and 4 million, depending on how one draws boundaries and estimates commuters from outlying areas. In 2005, Pune has over 1.5 million motor vehicles, Hanoi well under a million and Xi’an around 350,000. All cities also have a large amount of motor cycles or three wheeled rickshaws whereby Hanoi has faced the most explosive growth in the number of motorcycles.

Pune and Hanoi have rivers dividing them, while Xi’an is divided internally by its city wall. All cities face major challenges and choices in making transportation more sustainable. A little consideration suggests challenges for each city as transportation expands. But each city has different challenges, although the overwhelming numbers of vehicles in both Hanoi and Pune are striking. Each of the key policy issues each city confronts can be diagnosed and remedied using indicators as policy tools.

The PSUTA partnership will help the cities prioritize challenges, respond with forward-looking policies, and make its own transport system more sustainable. The most available indicators were related to access and congestion: vehicles, recent O-D survey showing relatively good access and mobility data, some information on time and speed. The most systematic gaps in local data were actual vehicle emission factors and ambient air concentrations.

The most systematic or pervasive gaps in formation and barriers to forming and using indicators had three dimensions: data, analytical, and people/organizational. Data gaps were large for some elements of access, but teams understood how to fill the gaps.

For clean air, all three cities lacked the detailed information for determining in-use motor vehicle emissions, for producing a mobile sources inventory to pin down the real sources of each pollutant (i.e., which kinds of vehicles, if from transport, or if not from transport).

No cities had systematic ambient air quality monitoring, although there were a few stations in each region.

All three cities felt that reducing vehicle emissions was the most pressing need, even if the data were poor, the conditions in the air were obvious.