Three cities of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (Peshawar, Mingora and Abbotabad) engaged to develop sustainable mobility

Peshawar, Mingora and Abbottabad, three cities located in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, joined the MobiliseYourCity Partnership in 2020 and decided to engage in a process to transform and modernise their urban mobility system.

Respectively with 4.2 Million inhabitants in Peshawar, over 2 Million in Mingora (at the district level of Swat) and nearly 1 Million in Abbottabad, those cities are facing a rapidly growing number of private vehicles. The local government of the KP province, in close coordination with the City of Peshawar, Mingora and Abbottabad, has decided to elaborate a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) for each city. The elaboration of those SUMPs for each city shall be the basis for developing and improving public transport.

Expected Results

Through those SUMPs, each city and the KP province want to develop a comprehensive understanding of mobility patterns and needs in order to define priorities to set up a sustainable urban mobility system. In the case of Mingora and Abbottabad, the SUMP should include the development of public transport system and substantial measures to improve traffic management. In the case of Peshawar, the SUMP should provide solutions to improve and extend the existing BRT system that was recently put in operation. In addition, as part of their efforts to improve air quality, the three cities want to encourage the development of non-motorised transport and to restrict and channel the growing number of private vehicles.

To make these changes sustainable, KP province is seeking to involve a large number of stakeholders and to improve the coordination between these actors. The Province and the three cities will also invest in building capacity among their technical teams in charge of transport. Lastly, the SUMPs elaboration aims at providing a comprehensive sustainable mobility plan at the urban scale for the three cities and at proposing conceptual design for priority projects to identify. Those priority projects could be launched rapidly after the SUMPs elaboration.

Support from MobiliseYourCity

The local government of KP province will receive direct support from AFD and ADB, who will hire a consortium of consultants to work directly with local governments to assist on developing their SUMP and propose conceptual design for identified priority projects.