Sustainable development has become a central objective of policy worldwide. Although the term is widely used, there is little agreement on what it means in practice and how progress toward it can be measured. The European Commission, as part of its Programme on Competitive and Sustainable Growth, commissioned the SUMMA (SUstainable Mobility, policy Measures and Assessment) project. Among SUMMA's objectives were to define and operationalize the concept of sustainable transport and mobility in terms of its environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and to define outcome indicators from the transport system that can help policy makers monitor progress toward its achievement. To achieve these objectives, we used the systems approach, which identifies the interrelationships among the elements of a complex system and helps in the design of policies to steer the system toward sustainability. This article describes the first phase of the systems approach: the set of outcome indicators that we developed and how we defined the transport system in terms of three markets-a movement market, a transport market, and a traffic market-in which choices are made that result in traffic streams. The traffic streams determine the values of the outcome indicators, which can then be used to identify good policies. The approach is illustrated with examples from the SUMMA project. Environmental Practice 8: 24-48 (2006)
In this paper the strategic transport policy assessment instrument HIGH-TOOL is presented. The model has been developed for the European Commission, allowing policy-makers to identify the most advantageous transport policies and to strategically evaluate the impacts of transport policies on transport, environment and economy. The main innovation of this policy assessment tool lies in the integration of originally independently functioning modelsi.e. passenger and freight demand, demography, and vehicle stock models, as well as economic, environmental and safety assessment models. With its traffic zones at the regional level of NUTS-2 and its aggregated view on the transport system, the instrument has a relatively lean structure avoiding runtime problems, without losing the spatial dimension. What distinguishes HIGH-TOOL from all other European transport policy assessment instruments: the model is an open source tool, it is freely available and does not require any commercial software to be run. In combination with its modular structure the HIGH-TOOL model can relatively easily be adjusted to other modelling methodologies or data. It can also comparatively easily be made responsive to "new" policies which are not in the scope of the current model version. Thus the HIGH-TOOL model lays the foundation for further innovations in the assessment of transport policies and mobility concepts.
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