Sustainability in traffic in general
Sustainability relates to the three areas environment, economy and society. For traffic development to be sustainable, it must thus contain aspects of all three areas.
The most important criteria used to assess whether traffic is ecological, economically efficient and socially just are the following:
- amount of greenhouse gases produced, such as CO2
- noise exposure and atmospheric load
- land use and impact on landscape and living space
- cost transparency
- price of transport service
- reachability of regional centres via public transport
- participation of population in decision-making
The scenario of sustainable mobility provided by the German Federal Environment Agency thus includes five essential tasks:
- Avoid traffic by reducing travel distance
- Make traffic and transportation more efficient through better utilisation of roads and vehicles
- Shift traffic to less environmentally harmful modes of transport (PrT to PuT)
- Handle traffic in a more eco-friendly way, through more economical, quiet and safe traffic flows
- Extensive traffic calming and a settlement and land use strategy harmonised with public transport (reduction of land consumption for settlement and transport purposes)
The sustainability strategy issued by the German Government is formulated as follows:
"With the aim of creating sustainable traffic and transport development and thereby equally accounting for economical, ecological and social factors transport policy faces three distinct challenges:
- maintaining a high level of mobility and at the same time reducing traffic loads produced by economy and society in order to slow down dynamic traffic growth,
- handling the remaining traffic growth efficiently and ecologically friendly and
- continuing to reduce the traffic emissions harmful to the environment and nature, people's health and quality of life" (German Government 2002a:181)."
