The adequate integration of sustainability into transport policy: some major dilemmas

ternalised in the transport price, but they are also predominantly affecting parties outside the transport system. Consequently, changes in the intensity of these effects do not feed back directly into the transport market. In that case public intervention has even a more complicated task, since it takes more time and is more complicated to learn what are actually the right balances for the trade-offs between adequate access and, in turn, sustainability, spatial quality, and public health. The presentations and discussions in Focus Group 4 all dealt, one way or another, with these tradeoffs. The represented approaches were about ; how to make the market (and public planners) better informed - options to internalise various types of external effects, comprehensive optimisation models for one or several trade-offs, dilemmas between the economic, social, and environmental dimension of sustainability, experienced and perceived policy implementation obstacles, amongst others, those following from social dilemma situations. In this short paper it is evidently impossible to discuss all the issues and findings from the seminars and synthesis papers produced during the project. Given the need to be selective amidst the plenty of topics this paper casts the discussion of the main findings into two themes, being: 1. the decisive influence of the choice of sustainability paradigm. 2. the problems regarding policy implementation. We argue that both in science and in policy-making there is lack of consensus regarding the operationalisation of sustainability in transport and the consequent sense of urgency; hence there is an apparent need to move much closer to a consensus and preferably rather quickly. However, the lack of a comprehensive consensus does not need to hold hostage those sustainable transport measures about which specialists largely agree. The implementation of those scientifically undisputed measures is often inhibited by a belated and excessively instrumentalist consideration of the social dimension. (A)

• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/15677133
• Authors:
  • HIMANEN, V
  • PERRELS, A
  • LEE-GOSSELIN, M
• Publication Date: 2006

Language

• English

Media Info

• Pagination: 77-98
• Serial:
  • EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TRANSPORT AND INFRASTRUCTURE RESEARCH
  • Volume: 6
  • Issue Number: 1
  • Publisher: DELFT UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • ISSN: 1567-7133
• Publication flags:

  Open Access (libre)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Decision making; Economics; Environment; Evaluation; Planning; Policy; Sustainable development
• ITRD Terms: 2248: Decision process; 255: Economics; 2455: Environment; 9020: Evaluation (assessment); 143: Planning; 173: Policy; 2427: Sustainability
• Subject Areas: Economics; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01037120
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: Transport Research Laboratory
• Files: ITRD
• Created Date: Nov 21 2006 8:54AM