Sustainability assessment at the transportation planning level: Performance measures and indexes

Christy Mihyeon Jeon, Adjo A. Amekudzi and Randall L. Guensler

Transport Policy, 2013, vol. 25, issue C, 10-21

Abstract: While the definition of a sustainable transportation system is varied, there is emerging consensus that transportation system sustainability should capture attributes of system effectiveness and system impacts on economic development, environmental integrity, and social quality of life. Sustainability assessment can be incorporated at the planning level in order to influence decision making, and support policies that affect regional sustainability. This paper reviews methodologies that can be applied in sustainability assessment in transportation planning in order to shed light on the procedures being used to incorporate sustainability more effectively in the planning process. Using data from the Atlanta Metropolitan Region, the study identifies performance measures based on sustainability issues and regional goals and evaluates proposed transportation and land use alternatives. The study evaluates and discusses several performance measures and aggregates them into indexes representing four parameters of sustainability: system effectiveness, environmental, economic, and social impacts, to enable visualization and assessment of tradeoffs and dominance for the competing alternatives. This study is potentially useful to agencies interested in understanding the range of tools being used for sustainability assessment, expanding or refining their performance measures to capture sustainability in transportation planning, and using them in evaluating tradeoffs among competing alternatives as well as in identifying dominant alternatives.

Keywords: Sustainable transportation systems; Atlanta metropolitan region; Decision making; Transportation planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X12001618
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:trapol:v:25:y:2013:i:c:p:10-21

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2012.10.004

Access Statistics for this article

Transport Policy is currently edited by Y. Hayashi

More articles in Transport Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().