Moving freight on public transit: Best practices,challenges, and opportunities

Freight on Transit (FOT) refers to an operational strategy where public transit vehicles and/or infrastructure are used to move freight. Examples include moving goods alongside passengers on buses, attaching cargo trailers to transit vehicles, and operating freight vehicles between trains on subway lines. This paper describes the methods and results of a three-round Delphi study engaging 34 transportation experts to explore challenges and opportunities of FOT and to conceptualize and evaluate potential FOT operations in Toronto. Traditional Delphi methods were used for the exploration of FOT challenges and opportunities, and a modified approach was formulated to integrate experts' opinions and develop new FOT concepts for Toronto. The results support previous claims that technical challenges of FOT may be easier to overcome than institutional barriers. Evaluation of potential FOT operating strategies in Toronto suggests that while the current public transit network does not have capacity to support additional movements, there may be realistic opportunities to include freight service in future projects as a means of offsetting operating costs and reducing the impacts of goods movements.     

Concessionary lending to developing countries

International transfers to promote the development of countries in the Third World began at the end of the Second World War. At first they were in the form of grants, mostly to colonies or ex-colonies. Then official development assistance from most industrial countries to most developing countries was institutionalized as it became apparent that the international capital market was inadequate in size and too costly for very poor countries. This led to official international lending on increasingly ‘soft’ terms. The ‘softening’ was brought about in a long complex discussion among the lending governments mostly within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Theoretical and practical considerations brought the argument substantially to an end in the late 1970s with the widespread acceptance of the principle that, after all, grants were preferable for the poorest of developing countries.