Great question and I can only touch briefly on some of the issues -- issues you have probably already considered. If we take urbanization to mean the proportion of a population living in urban areas, and "transportation" as an indication of the maturity of the transport system, you are asking if we can become more developed without advances in transport. Transport development clearly aids the development of the economy (movement of freight to and from cities and ports) and the lack of transport development (where it lags the rest of the economy) is clearly a hindrance / drag on the economy. But, do you have to have transport development to urbanize? Does transport development come first or does it catch up as the pace of urbanization increases? Is there a point at which further urbanization is stalled or prevented by weak transport infrastructure? To all these questions I would have to say urbanization and the growth of cities is a very major force and many economies suffer from a lagging transport infrastructure. Therefore they have excessive transport costs, urban congestion, delay and weak air transport etc. As the economy develops, the desire would be to make sure the level of transport infrastructure keeps up with the rest of the dynamics.
There are also arguments that working on improving and investing in transport can prime the pump of development (World Bank ideas...)
Thank you very much prof. Morton E. O'Kelly
Transport system plays a role in the urbanization, which means the growth of cities horizontally and vertically. But does this apply to small and medium-sized cities? In some developing countries, cities do not have an urban transport systems, which means that the existing transport system is characterized by randomized, and many other factors plays a major role in urban transformations.
Does this mean that the relationship is between the planned transport systems and urbanization only?
In terms of smaller and medium sized cities -- I think there are two issues -- internal movement within the city and external linkage of the city to the rest of the urban system. I believe that regardless of the size of city it is possible to consider how well it handles internal movement; if there are spatially separated places of work and residence there has to be some system to make these linkages. They could well be under-developed in the initial start up. If the city continues to grow without effort to add transport infrastructure, the problems will compound. In terms of external links I suppose that we could overlook or even ignore the poor connectivity for very small places (that is perhaps what keeps them small?) but eventually most developed countries try to diffuse higher quality access to even the periphery and poorly served areas. If the country is just beginning to develop, it would probably have to focus first on the major places. The EU for example contributed massive investment to equalize the experience or at least improve it in peripheral areas.
This is probably too vague for the special case you want to study -- can I suggest a literature search from World Bank or other major agencies to see if they can provide an overview of transport and development for your region.
Prof. Morton E. O'Kelly
Thank you for your important answers, and there are several World Bank studies involving subject from near or far, I'll start to see it.
My thanks and appreciation for your interest in answering my questions, and I hope to continue your interest in my questions.
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