Commentary: Operationalizing the Concept of Sustainable Transport and Mobility

Abstract

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)

‘Resilience thinking’ in transport planning

“…Walker et al (2006); Marsden et al (2010); Marsden and Snell (2009). In the U.K., all local authorities are now required to set out five-year programs with commitments on progress over a range of mandatory and voluntary indicators (Marsden et al, 2006).…”

A methodology for measuring the sustainability of car transport systems

“…Banister links the issue to urban form, where the structure of the built environment affects the demand for transport. Similarly, Lucas et al (2007) and Walker et al (2006) focus more on access to jobs, goods and services than on mobility. These different ways of assessing transport systems address the fundamental question of how access to goods and services could be most sustainably provided.…”

“…However, they do not address the issue of how to generate the indicators in the first place. Several studies present seemingly complete, comprehensive indicator sets but lack a clear framework or method by which the indicators were generated, which means that it is difficult to check that all the impacts have been captured (Kennedy, 2002;Walker et al, 2006;WBCSD, 2004;Nicolas et al, 2003;Journard and Nicolas, 2010;Fedra, 2011). Using indicators as a tool for driving change by focusing on just a few, such as CO 2 emissions, provides an incomplete picture of the issues (Roth and Kåberger, 2002;Grimes-Casey et al, 2009;Zachariadis, 2005).…”