The new economics of urban mobility in emerging markets.

The planning logic that produced the modern Western city — separate the car from the pedestrian, separate the home from the work, design around predictable commuting peaks — is being rewritten in real time across emerging-market cities. The forces driving the rewrite are not nostalgia for European-style transit. They are demographic, economic, and technological, and they push toward a mobility mix that looks very different from what the planning manuals assumed.

This article looks at the shift through the lens of six cities — Istanbul, Cairo, Lagos, Jakarta, Bogotá, and Karachi — and what their changing modal splits suggest for the next decade of urban-mobility investment.

What the data shows

Three patterns are visible in the data — and they are not the patterns the OECD planning manuals assumed.

1. The dominant mode is paratransit, not metro

In five of the six cities, the largest share of daily trips is taken on bus, minibus, microbus, or BRT — what transport economists call paratransit. Metro and heavy rail, despite consuming the bulk of urban-mobility capital investment over the past two decades, account for under 15% of trips in every city in the sample.

This is not because metro is unloved. It is because metro is structurally limited: the capital cost per kilometer is high, the construction timeline is long, and the catchment is narrow. Paratransit is the workhorse, and the policy gap is that paratransit operators are usually informal, fragmented, and politically inconvenient to organize. The investment patterns chase the prestige asset; the mobility comes from the underinvested mode.

2. The two-wheel revolution

In Jakarta, Karachi, and Lagos, two-wheelers — motorcycles, scooters, increasingly electric — account for between 12% and 32% of trips. Twenty years ago this share was negligible. The growth has been driven by three forces: rapid urban sprawl that has lengthened average trips beyond walking distance, the unaffordability of cars for the urban middle class, and the rise of ride-hailing apps that have organized two-wheel labour markets at scale.

The implications for planners are significant. Two-wheelers are dangerous (Lagos reports a fatality rate eight times that of cars per passenger-km), they are difficult to integrate with mass transit, and they create air-quality issues even where they are electric (tire and road dust dominate at this point in many cities). The OECD planning manuals do not really cover this mode. The policy is being invented in real time.

Metro stations get the photographs. Buses and minibuses move the cities. The investment patterns chase the prestige asset; the mobility comes from the underinvested mode.

3. Walking is everywhere, and almost nowhere designed for

The third pattern: walking accounts for 14–22% of all daily trips in every city in the sample. This is a higher share than metro in every single case. And yet sidewalk infrastructure, pedestrian crossings, shaded routes, and basic safety design for walkers attract a tiny fraction of mobility capital in the cities concerned. The marginal dollar spent on a walking improvement — a wider sidewalk, a safer crossing, a tree canopy — moves more trips per dollar than almost any other intervention.

This is the most consistent finding in our work across the six cities. The cheapest, highest-impact mobility intervention is almost always a sidewalk programme, and it is almost always the last one funded.

Where the investment dollar should go

The classic urban-mobility hierarchy in emerging-market cities allocates roughly: 60% to metro and rail, 20% to road expansion, 12% to bus and BRT, 5% to active mobility (walking, cycling), and 3% to paratransit formalization. The hierarchy reflects political incentives and donor preferences as much as transport economics. A reallocation closer to actual modal share would invert most of these proportions.

We are not arguing against metro investment; in dense corridors at the right city size, metro is the right answer. We are arguing that the marginal urban-mobility dollar in most emerging-market cities should be going to BRT, paratransit formalization, and active-mobility infrastructure — and that the current allocation chronically over-weights heavy rail.