World Transport Policy & Practice – Vol. 20, No. 1. Winter 2014 worldstreets.wordpress/2014/01/31/world-transport-policy-practice-vol-20-no-1/ This issue of World Transport Policy and Practice opens the journal’s 20th year of consistent commitment to sustainable transport, which embraces the urgent need to cut global emissions of carbon dioxide, to reduce the amount of new infrastructure of all kinds and to highlight the importance of future generations, the poor, those who live in degraded environments and those deprived of human rights by planning systems that put a higher importance on economic objectives than on the environment and social justice. The article by Mary Surridge, Cathy Green and colleagues about maternal deaths and access to health care facilities in rural Zambia is a timely reminder of the importance of accessibility to things that really do matter and the irrelevance of much western funded transport infrastructure to the lives of women, the poor and rural dwellers in Africa. The fact that 350,000 women die each year as a result of childbirth complications and 75% of these deaths could be prevented through “timely access to essential health care” is a powerful indicator of the failure of health policy and the total irrelevance of the mobility paradigm and infrastructure spending to the lives of ordinary people.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 13:23:28 +0000