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This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
| | Sustainable development Portal |
Sustainable transport, also commonly referred to as Sustainable Transportation or Sustainable Mobility, has no widely accepted definition. Since it is a sector-specific sub-set to the post-1988 sustainable development movement, it is often defined in words such as this: “Sustainable transportation is about meeting or helping meet the mobility needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” But this is only a starting point.
The concept of sustainable mobility is a reaction to things that have gone radically and visibly wrong with current transportation policy, practice and performance over the last half of the twentieth century. In particular unsustainable transportation consumes more energy and creates pollution and declining service levels despite increasing investments. It delivers poor service for specific social and economic groups.
Over most of the Twentieth Century, it was assumed that adequate transportation infrastructure needed to be built, since it provided an essential underpinning to growth and economic health. Accordingly the main concern of transport planners and policy makers was in the “supply” of transportation, and specifically in ensuring that supporting infrastructure was going to be adequate to support all projected requirements. The dominant approach was, therefore, to forecast, then build to meet that projection.
Similarly, in public transportation planning, the supply and efficient operation of vehicles received the most attention. As a result, many analysts and observers now claim that most places have heavily overbuilt their physical transportation infrastructures. In fact, this over building has led to unsustainable levels of traffic and resource use.
The overbuilt roadways have also led to other unintended consequences, such as radical drops in transit, walking, and bicycling. In many cases, streets became void of “life.” Stores, schools, government centers and libraries moved away from central cities, and many residents who could not flee to the suburbs were abandoned. As schools were closed their mega-school replacements in outlying areas forced more auto-centric traffic. Up to 30% of all peak hour traffic is now school related (up from 7% a few years ago).
Yet another impact was an increase in sedentary lifestyles, causing and complicating a national epidemic of obesity, and accompanying dramatically increased health care costs.
The sustainable transport movement, which has gradually gained in force over the last decade and a half, has in the process started to shift the emphasis in public spending and actions away from building and supply, to management and demand. In all cases the values of heightened respect of the environment and prudent use of natural resources are central, with varying degrees of urgency expressed by different actors and interests. That said, it is still very much a minority movement and most actual expenditures in the sector are determined by criteria other than sustainability. What remains clear is that sustainable transportation mainly refers to human behavior, not to technology. In that sense, a behavioral approach considers not only a set of non-polluting and human scaled travel behaviors, regardless of the means and technology used, but also a set of reinforcers both individual and social to promote that sort of behaviors.
Colloquially, sustainable transport is used to describe all forms of transport which minimize emissions of carbon dioxide and pollutants. It can refer to public transport, car sharing, walking and cycling as well as technology such as electric and hybrid cars and biodiesel. In particular the phrase has been adopted by environmental campaign groups and the British and Australian national and local governments, though both the phrase and the concepts have now spread around the world.
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Understanding of what sustainable transport is all about has steadily advanced in the last fifteen years. One early and often cited definition offered back in 1994 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) may be noted: "Transportation that does not endanger public health or ecosystems and meets mobility needs consistent with (a) use of renewable resources at below their rates of regeneration and (b) use of non-renewable resources at below the rates of development of renewable substitutes". This provided a conservative benchmark view of what sustainable transport is all about which is still often put forward in the public debate.
The New Zealand Ministry for the Environment offers this more widely shared and complete definition, which extends the reach in terms which are today generally accepted in the field:
A shorter definition by the Sustran network does a good job in one paragraph of summarizing the consensus view from the vantage of transport activists and many NGOs:
In general the phrase is used to encourage more attention to “softer transport options” such as improved provision for cycling, walking, public spaces, rail and other forms of public transport, together with more aggressive control of car use in central areas. It is not usually used to qualify high technology projects such as monorails, personal rapid transit and the like, not least since one of the earmarks of sustainable transport projects is that they are in general careful users of money and space.
Sustainable transportation programs are increasingly giving attention to the importance of cutting the number of vehicles in circulation (VMT) though a wide range of Transportation Demand Management measures. They also look to “movement substitutes” such as telework, telecommuting and better clustering of activities so as to reduce the need for motorized transport.
Whereas it started as a movement driven by environmental concerns, over these last years there has been increased emphasis on social equity and fairness issues, and in particular the need to ensure proper access and services for lower income groups and people with mobility limitations, including the fast growing population of older citizens. Many of those who have not traditionally been well served have been those who either cannot or should not drive their own cars, and those for whom the cost of ownership causes a severe financial burden.
The automotive and energy industries increasingly use the term Sustainable Mobility to describe and promote their technology developments, primarily in the areas of new motive and engine technologies and advances. The impact of these advances, however, requires at least one or two decades to make a perceptible difference in terms of sustainability.
The concept of "sustainable transport" has been increasingly replaced by the concept of "sustainable mobility", with sustainable mobility expanding the original concept, which does not take social dimensions of mobility into account and focuses more on operational aspects of sustainability.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development defines "sustainable mobility" as "the ability to meet the needs of society to move freely, gain access, communicate, trade, and establish relationships without sacrificing other essential human or ecological values today or in the future."World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) (2001-08-01). "Mobility 2001 - World mobility at the end of the twentieth century and its sustainability Report".
This definition encompasses the following dimensions:
The terms ‘sustainable transport’ is an almost accidental follow-on to the earlier term Sustainable Development whose origins in turn were the 1987 Our Common Future (1987, World Commission on Environment and Development of the United Nations). In the years following publication of the Brundtland Report, there was considerable discussion of a variety of issues that are part of the sustainable development nexus, but transportation considerations were not in the front line in those early years.
One of the first international organizations to have a closer look at the concept of sustainable transport from the vantage of government policy was a small international working group led by Peter Wiederkehr at the OECD in 1994, that agreed that a new policy approach is needed which places environmental criteria up front along with other policy goals. Recognizing this need, the OECD initiated in 1994 an international project to define and chart a path towards Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST). The overall objectives of the EST project are to provide an understanding of EST, its implications and requirements, and to develop methods and guidelines towards its realization. The core of the EST approach was to develop long-term scenarios and identify instruments and strategies capable of achieving it. To this end the OECD organized with the Government of Canada the 1996 International Conference: Towards Sustainable Transportation in Vancouver, Canada. One result of this were the 1996 Vancouver Principles towards Sustainable Transportation. (The OECD project shut down its operation in July 2004, though the members of the original working group continue to communicate and collaborate at the specific project and policy level under the leadership of the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Environment.)
The EU Directorate-General for Transport and Energy (DG-TREN) has launched a programme which focusses mostly on Urban Transport. Its main measures are:
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