The idea of sustainable transportation

Sustainable development should include three principles about fairness, sustainability and commonality. In society, we have to distribute the resource fairly to satisfy the need of contemporary and next generations. In economy, we have to develop economy in sustainable progress but protect the natural system of the earth.

And in ecological, we look forward to coexist between human and the nature. This idea about sustainable development was proposed from the proposal about World Conservation Strategy by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 1980s. And then, World Commission on Environment and Development of United Nations in 1987 (WCED) put forward the special project report of “our common future”, commonly defined as development that meets the needs and aspirations of current generations while preserving the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and aspirations.

OECD (2000) declaimed the core concern of sustainability is in ensuring that while economic and social development continues, the natural and human environment is preserved, and the impacts of development and environmental management are equitably distributed. They also have clearly explanation about “sustainable transportation”, and based on it to establish the sector of Environment Sustainable Transport (ESI). They set the goal of sustainable transportation to decline the pollution from the vehicles. The way is how do reduce the trips, how to develop and encourage

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public transport and how to improve the impact to environment from transportation by technique.

Steg and Gifford (2005) propose the principle of sustainable transportation about how to balance environment, society and economy by seeking and building up the important indicators. Government could take advantage of the effective sustainable goal to keep a watchful eye on the development of sustainable transportation by effective indicators. According to the study from Geurs and Van Wee (2000), they promote some criterions to evaluate CO2, NOx, particles emission and land use. And then, they present three different scenarios to evaluate sustainable transportation in different levels：high-technology scenario, mobility-change scenario and combination scenario. And we could know from that, if we want to reach the goal of sustainability, we have to make a breakthrough in technology and urgent to change the behavior of human and the style of economy. However, it also causes some problems about that if government always develops forward sustainability, whether it’s accepted by population or not?

There are many different definitions about sustainable transportation in many references. However, they are talking about the same thing. That is how to get balance among economy, society and environment between different generations to reach the goal of sustainable transportation. And government could base on contemporary transportation system to develop sustainability in future, including the land use, pollution emissions, traffic safety, traffic noise, and healthy affection, the cost of emergency and accessibility (Steg and Gifford, 2005). And at the same time, governments also have to consider different strategies which will have different impacts on sustainability. Changing the transportations system in use would have other

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influences on any un-sustainability development. That is why the governments have to consider the levels of society, economy and environment when they do some policy making.

Different stakeholders meet their goals with widely different priorities to reach consensus on interim goals. In Amekudzi (2009)’s research, they present a model about sustainability footprint to assess the quality of life for society and the impact of natural environment of transportation system. As the result, constructing a useful and feasible tool to observe and develop sustainability is necessary. We can proof that by the idea from Acutt and Dodgson (1997), they consider transportation department should apply different economic strategies to incline the impact on environment from transportation system and assess the utility of all, including the tax on pollution, fuels and the usage of the vehicles.

Discussion

According to some studies, we could find out that if we want to develop forward sustainability, economic, environment and equity are the different levels what we have to find out the balance among those. There are also some studies discussing about how to use the different indicators or tools to evaluate the sustainability. Therefore, this study will summarize some tables to point out the difference among different tools which used by evaluating the transportation sustainability.

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2.2 The tools of sustainable development

Because of economy improvement, the consumption of resources also increases rapidly. When earth reaches the limit of ecological capacity, there are also some crises for human being surviving. Therefore, the governments around the world have set the goals to solve the problems about sustainability and develop some programs and indicators to assess the system. The results are summarized in table 2.1.

Table 2.1 Comparable analysis of tools assessing sustainability

Tools Contents Factors

Sustainable development indicators

Solve the problem and assess sustainability by three levels of economy, society and environment.

Require how much land and water area to reduce the resources to consume and absorb its wastes under prevailing technology

Based on the environment space in 2010to assess the usage of environment resources and consider the problem of resources allocations.

Assess the environment impacts of the process from extracts, production, usage and discards

Use materials and energy more efficiency, and incline the cost of economy and impact of environment