Toward an urban transport sustainability index: an European comparison

Abstract

Introduction The aim of paper is to cluster policies of sustainable mobility in order to define an essential set of specific Transport Performance Indicators (TPI). TPIs are standardized measures suitable for analysis in order to appraise the feasibility of a transport policy or an infrastructural project. Data collection of TPIs is a crucial phase, but data detection and monitoring are not standardized at the city level. Thus, there is no a standard for data collection and storing, this aspect makes much difficult to compare different city contexts. This issue is critical and bounds the analysis of built scenarios. A standardized set of transport performance indicators becomes, hence, essential for monitoring the implemented policies. Methodology and results The paper answers to some of these questions, providing a specific set of sustainable and transport performance indicators to evaluate effects of policy measures. Furthermore, it shows a comparative analysis of different European cities in terms of development, sustainability and infrastructures, by using transport performance indicators. A Normalized Transport Sustainability Index has been built using identified TPIs, in order to measure and hence to compare the whole sustainability of adopted policies in different urban areas. The same NTSI allows to appraise the expected results and thus to tune the policy measures. Conclusion We can affirm that an high value of sustainability is associated, in general, to small-medium cities in term both population and urban area; nevertheless, for large cities, the adoption of policy measures, from a side, to control the urban sprawl, from the other side, to manage the urban transport demand with an adequate public transport development allows to achieve a more sustainable mobility.

Crowd logistics: an opportunity for more sustainable urban freight transport?

“…Sustainable development is most commonly defined as 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs ' [44]. With this, the joint harmonisation of three issues is implied: economic growth, social equality and protection of environmental resources [13]. This could also be referred to as the triple-P or triple bottom line of sustainability (People, Profit, Planet) [34].…”

Sustainability Indicators in Assessing Urban Transport Systems

“…According to Zito and Salvo (2011), the following are necessary for reaching sustainable mobility: decreased demand of transport needs, encouragement of modal shift, decrease of trip length and incentive of more efficiency. To avoid unilateral and uncommon definitions, the broadest concept of sustainable transportation may be accepted, as "satisfying current transportation and mobility needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Zito and Salvo, 2011, p.180).…”

“…Nevertheless there is an increasing need to develop new and more efficient assessment tools for helping the decision making processes which are able to give answers to the new challenges regarding climate change, and through this, in related to sustainability. Zito and Salvo (2011) declared that there is no internationally agreed standard for collecting, evaluating and normalizing indicators, however these steps are crucial in identifying cost-, and time-effective set of indicators.…”

“…Zito and Salvo (2011) suggested requirement regarding variables, what are the followings: comprehensive, high quality of data, comparable, easy to understand accessible and transparent. Joumard et al (2011) determined criteria for indicator assessment and selection as well.…”

Comparative analysis of passenger transport sustainability in European cities

“…Here it is worth noting the study carried out by Jeon and Amekudzi (2005), who characterised the emergent thinking on what constitutes urban transportation sustainability and how to measure it in their collection and classification of indicators used by 16 international institutions -mainly relating to planning and infrastructure provision. Finally, other approaches have focused their analysis on the assessment of policies, in terms of efficiency and equitable functioning (Savelson et al, 2006;Zito and Salvo, 2011).…”