TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE
TRANSPORTATIONOECD International Conference, Vancouver Canada
TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE
TRANSPORTATION
In looking down the road towards sustainable transportation, several issues need to be kept in mind. In order to be acceptable to consumers, governments, and the private sector, sustainable transportation will first need to meet several goals simultaneously: minimize costs; promote economic development; minimize environmental degradation and the resultant impacts on human health; minimize imports of oil; maximize safety; and maximize accessibility by all to the services provided by transportation. In short, the goals of sustainable transportation overlap substantially with the goals of achieving livable communities. Second, it is important to recall that most of the future growth in transportation will be in the developing world, where vehicular demand is expected to explode in the next decades while transport-related problems today are already quite massive: poor air quality, growing levels of import dependence, intolerable congestion, etc.
These facts point to the need for highly integrated solutions to achieve sustainable transportation. It is not simply a matter of just pursuing major technological advances in vehicles and fuels, or modal shifting, or transportation demand management, or land-use restructuring. It is a combination of all of these, because a single path is much less likely to achieve these goals simultaneously. Pursuing technological advances in vehicles and fuels, for example, will not address the problems of growing congestion as more vehicles pour onto the roads. Similarly, an approach that just embraces modal changes and land-use restructuring is not likely to achieve acceptable air quality or reduce dependence on imported oil if the vehicles continue to be highly polluting and consume petroleum. And, in fact, cities that are seen as models of sustainable transportation such as Curitiba, Brazil, already embrace this vision of the need for an integrated approach.