An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation

Policy, Planning and Implementation

Preston L Schiller, Jeffrey R Kenworthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317289142
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Cities around the globe struggle to create better and more equitable access to important destinations and services, all the while reducing the energy consumption and environmental impacts of mobility. An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation illustrates a new planning paradigm for sustainable transportation through case studies from around the world with hundreds of valuable resources and references, color photos, graphics and tables.

The second edition builds and expands upon the highly acclaimed first edition, with new chapters on urban design and urban, regional and intercity public transportation, as well as expanded chapters on automobile dependence and equity issues; automobile cities and the car culture; the history of sustainable and unsustainable transportation; the interrelatedness of technologies, infrastructure energy and functionalities; and public policy and public participation and exemplary places, people and programs around the globe. Among the many valuable additions are discussions of autonomous vehicles (AVs), electric vehicles (EVs), airport cities, urban fabrics, urban heat island effects and mobility as a service (MaaS). New case studies show global exemplars of sustainable transportation, including several from Asia, a case study of participative and deliberative public involvement, as well as one describing life in the Vauban ecologically planned community of Freiburg, Germany. Students in affiliated sustainability disciplines, planners, policymakers and concerned citizens will find many provides practical techniques to innovate and transform transportation.

Chapter One
A highly mobile planet and its challenges: automobile dependence, equity and inequity

Sustainable transportation, accessible transportation or sustainable mobility?

This chapter presents an approach to characterizing, defining and exploring a few of the major issues associated with transportation and efforts to move it towards greater sustainability. Several differences between conventional approaches to transportation, business as usual (BAU) and sustainable transportation (ST) are delineated. A brief treatment of the expansiveness and extensiveness of freight and passenger mobility and some aspects of transportation infrastructure are presented to put some of the issues surrounding these into a broader, even global, perspective. Two major issues confronting ST, automobile dependence and (in)equity (including social justice), are discussed in depth. In recent years, the terms ‘sustainable mobility’ and ‘accessible transportation’ have come to be used interchangeably with or substituted for the term ‘sustainable transportation’. This book continues the use of the longer-lived term ‘sustainable transportation’, while also addressing a range of accessibility and mobility issues.

What is sustainable transportation about?

ST emerged from three main sources:

1. Concerns about transportation’s burdens and the counter-productivity of much conventional highway-oriented planning began to emerge around the planet from the 1970s onward as pollution increased and the destructive effects of highway expansion upon cities attracted more attention (Stringer and Wenzel 1976; Gakenheimer 1978; Newman and Kenworthy 1989, 1999a, 2015).
2. The recognition in some places that reducing traffic in cities through traffic calming (deliberately slowing personal motor vehicles, or PMVs) and pedestrianization (excluding PMVs from certain streets) had many benefits for mobility and the environment, including reductions in vehicular traffic (‘traffic evaporation’) and traffic-related injuries, especially those of pedestrians and bicyclists, and increases in the numbers of people walking, bicycling and using public transportation.
3. The growth of sustainability awareness, especially following the Brundtland Commission’s report (WCED 1987) on sustainable development as ‘development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Many key works have emerged since, including the Millennium Development Goals from 2000,¹ the new Sustainable Development Goals as well the New Urban Agenda adopted in 2016 at the Habitat III conference in Quito.² Such broad global objectives have filtered into the sustainable transport agendas worldwide.³ There is an increasing effort globally, especially through the UN, to integrate sustainability into the mainstream of transportation policy and planning, especially as it affects climate change.⁴
4. The growth of sustainability awareness, as well as action on issues such as climate change, has been moved forward by the crucial role of citizen participation in pushing this agenda and the especially significant increase in citizen and NGO activity, particularly since 2009 (Solnit 2015; 350.org 2016).

These three strands led to a lively discussion about ST and many excellent efforts to describe, characterize or define it since the 1990s.⁵ After a series of meetings and workshops in the 1990s and early 2000s, an Environmentally Sustainable Transportation working group of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed a brief definition:

(A)n environmentally sustainable transport system is one where transportation does not endanger public health or ecosystems and meets needs for access consistent with (a) use of renewable resources below their rates of regeneration, and (b) use of non-renewable resources below the rates of development of renewable substitutes.⁶

While all efforts to define a field as complex as ST are fraught with difficulty, there are common threads in various efforts examining ST which emphasize that sustainability with regard to passenger transportation should:

• meet basic access and mobility needs in ways that do not degrade the environment;
• not deplete the resource base upon which it is dependent;
• serve multiple economic and environmental goals;
• maximize efficiency in overall resource utilization;
• improve or maintain access to employment, goods and services while shortening trip lengths and/or reducing the need to travel; and
• enhance the livability and human qualities of urban regions (Schiller and Kenworthy 1999, 2003; Schiller, 2004).

Differences between sustainable transportation and business as usual

Rather than attempting an objectifying definition, it might be more useful to understand sustainable transportation in contrast to that which it is opposed. The dominant transportation paradigm until now has emphasized single-mode mobility—whether automobiles, planes or huge cargo ships; ‘hard path’⁷ approaches relying upon facility expansion— whether roads, parking, ports or runways; as well as financing that often masks the full costs and environmental consequences of its arrangements. The paradigm of conventional transportation planning and policy may be termed BAU. The differences between BAU and ST will be visited many times throughout this book. Some of the major points of comparison are presented in Table 1.1.

Unsustainable transportation: the magnitude of the problem

The challenge facing the shift from BAU to ST is great. It touches upon almost every aspect of life: ecosystem health, livability of communities, access to jobs and services, and the costs of basic goods, including foodstuffs, to identify a few. One way of understanding the world that BAU in transportation has led to is to consider the magnitude of personal and freight mobility and the increasing length and dispersion of trips. The concept of ‘hypermobility’ is very useful in this regard.

Table 1.1 Comparison of business as usual and sustainable transportation

Business as usual (BAU)	Sustainable transportation (ST)
Emphasizes mobility and quantity (more, faster, further, noisier, dispersed)	Emphasizes accessibility and quality (closer, better, slower, smaller, more compact)
Emphasizes one mode (automobility)	Emphasizes plurality (multi-modality)
Often lacks good connections between modes	Emphasizes interconnections (inter-modality)
Accommodates and accepts trends	Seeks to interrupt and reverse harmful trends
Plans and builds based on forecasts of likely demand (predict and provide)	Works backwards from a preferred vision to planning and provision (deliberate and decide)
Expands roads to respond to travel demand	Manages transportation or mobility demand
Ignores many social and environmental costs	Incorporates full costs; planning and provision
Transportation planning often in ‘silos’ disconnected from environmental, social and other planning areas	Emphasizes integrated planning combining transportation with other relevant areas

Source: Preston L. Schiller (also cf. Banister 2008)

Hypermobility

The magnitude of the mobility of persons and freight and the vast trip distances generated by such mobility are presented in Box 1.1 and Table 1.2. BAU in transportation has meant that more roads have been built and expanded, which has not led to less traffic congestion. It has led to more dr...