Book Title: Institutional Barriers to Sustainable Urban Transport in Pakistan. Book Author: Muhammad Imran (PhD) Book Publisher: Ameena Saiyid, Oxford University Press ISBN: 978-0-19-547666-8 Dr. Hans Frey (Secretary General), Council of Social Sciences, Pakistan (COSS).

1. Email to Dr. Hans Frey (Secretary General), Council of Social Sciences, Pakistan (COSS).
Book Review
Book Title: Institutional Barriers to Sustainable Urban Transport in Pakistan.
Book Author: Muhammad Imran (PhD)
Book Publisher: Ameena Saiyid, Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978-0-19-547666-8
Pages: 298
About the Author:
Dr. Muhammad Imran is a lecturer in the Resource and Environmental
Planning programme at Massey University, New Zealand where he teaches
transport and urban planning. With experience of more than a decade in
teaching, research and in professional practices in urban transport planning in
New Zealand, Australia & in Pakistan. He complete his graduate and post
graduate in City and Regional Planning at University of Melbourne, Australia
and, as an Asian Development Bank (ADB) Scholar, received a postgraduate
degree in Urban Planning at the University of Hong Kong.
Review of the Book:
Transportation plays a significant part in the modern world; it offers
tremendous assistances to society, but it also carry out significant social,
economic, and environmental costs. Sustainable transport development
requires institutionalization of social, economic and integrating environmental,
factors in order to drive optimal solutions to our many persistent issues,
especially global warming other and eco-climatic changes. This multidimension book covers various aspects of essential real-time scenarios of
Pakistan, which reflects a new sustainable transportation planning paradigm.

2. It discuss the various periods of policies and explores the models of sustainable
development and viable transportation, defines practical practices for
comprehensive evaluation, provides tools for multi-modal transport planning,
and presents innovative mobility management solutions to transportation
problems.
Books also picture the present urban transport in Pakistan that is managed by
building wider and improved roads. By contrast the doctrines of sustainable
urban transport embolden the practice of non-motorized and public transport.
These approaches of transport can be more efficacious in highly populated
Pakistani cities, but the direction of transport policy is in the opposite
direction: towards heavy investment only in roads. The study of transport
institutions in Pakistan indicates that transport solutions are mainly a matter
of the trade of knowledge from the developed to the developing world. This
results in an incongruity of transport policy with local needs for mobility and
safety, as well as economical, sociological & ecological sustainability. The
concept of path dependence is developed to explore how urban transport
solutions in Pakistan become locked-in overtime as a result of past decisions
on infrastructure investment, funding priorities, organizational structure,
specific techniques and mental models of international and local institutions.
This book identifies organizations, procedures & discourse fields in path
dependence as barriers to sustainable urban transport in Pakistan and
proposed building the policy capacity of local institutions for institutional
change in Pakistani cities.
Government Policymakers, transporters, students of various disciplines,
planners, and concerned citizens will find many of its stimulating concepts and
approaches of considerable value as they engage in the processes of
understanding and altering transportation towards better sustainability. This
book imitates a fundamental transformation in transportation decision making.
It emphases on accessibility rather than mobility, emphasizes the need to
increase the range of options and influences considered in analysis, and
delivers practical tools to allow students, government’s policy makers,
planners, and the general public to define the best solution to the
transportation problems facing a public. The complexity of transportation
systems and their negative social and environmental effects are today at the
center of attention. This book focuses on the impact of institutions and
regulatory systems on transport systems and travel behavior. While
institutions appear to play an important role in the economic success of many
countries, this book considers the extent to which they also support
sustainable development.
This book presents an investigation of the institutional barriers averting the
development of a new image for urban transport compatible with these
authenticities and in those terms 'sustainable'. Representing various case

3. studies to understanding transport policy, this book brings sophisticated
political-institutional analysis to what has traditionally been the domain of
engineering and technology. The text takes readers through each and every
mode of transport, beginning with human-powered modes and ending in
motorized modes, including marine and air transport. The modes are analyzed
separately and in comparison with others according to several criteria:
Capacity/utility/functionality
considerations;
infrastructure
demands;
resource consumption; land use considerations; pollution; and costs. In ways
that non-technically trained readers as well as planning students professionals
can find useful the book includes guidance on how to optimize transportation
systems; balancing economic, social and environmental objectives while
creating just, robust, and diverse, rather than one-size-fits-all, solutions. The
modes are grouped and compared within their respective contexts, and there is
vital discussion and differentiation between passenger and freight-goods
transport. The final section develops a comprehensive summary of the previous
chapters and develops arguments for sustainable transportation policymaking
and integrated planning, providing international examples and case studies
and extracting from them general applications for integrated sustainable
transportation.