How to monitor sustainable mobility in cities? Literature review in the frame of creating a set of sustainable mobility indicators

The role of sustainable mobility and its impact on society and the environment is evident and recognized worldwide. Nevertheless, although there is a growing number of measures and projects that deal with sustainable mobility issues, it is not so easy to compare their results and, so far, there is no globally applicable set of tools and indicators that ensure holistic evaluation and facilitate replicability of the best practices. In this paper, based on the extensive literature review, we give a systematic overview of relevant and scientifically sound indicators that cover different aspects of sustainable mobility that are applicable in different social and economic contexts around the world. Overall, 22 sustainable mobility indicators have been selected and an overview of the applied measures described across the literature review has been presented

A High-Speed Passenger Transport Network to Overcome Peripherality. Case Study Portugal

This study is focusing on the problem of connecting peripheral areas to the European passenger transport network. Remote areas are suffering from insufficient inter-regional transport services and missing links to Europe's economic core regions. Transport infrastructure development has therefore been identified as one of the key issues to bring forward the European integration. The case of Portugal reveals some interesting aspects in transport policy and transport planning that without any doubt are of general relevance for the whole area of European cohesion. The European Commission has contributed a corner stone to the transport planning in Europe with the development of guidelines for a common transport policy and the outlines for a trans-European transport networks. Though in the theoretical framework of the common transport policy interconnection of the European regions with intermodal and interoperable transport networks is a key issue, the first step to realisation, the trans-European networks have been massively criticised for a number of inconsistencies and shortcomings. To sum it up, it can be stated that the trans-European transport networks' design does hardly reflect the necessity ofthe development of intermodality. This TEN scenario is also true for the high-speed train connection planned in Portugal, which out of many reasons will never be realised. The study proposes an alternative approach through using a less costly technology - the pendular train system- to improve the performance of Portuguese railway services and interconnect this service to aviation with Lisbon Airport as an efficient interface. The performance potential of a pendular train system is demonstrated through a computer simulation a part of the corridor Lisbon-Porto. For this simulation the software programme Railway Simulator (RWSJ' running on an Apple TM Macintosh Iiic, is used which originally was designed to build the time schedules for the national Portuguese train network. (author's abstract)Series: Research Reports of the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScienc

Sustainability of Urban Freight Transport: Retail Distribution and Local Regulations in Cities

Although our urbanized civilization requires freight transport in order to sustain it, urban freight transport is especially recognized for its unsustainable impacts. To reduce the unsustainable impacts of urban freight transport, many local governments develop policies that focus sometimes more on banning or restricting urban transport than on making it more sustainable. In the first part of this thesis we develop a framework to structure the urban freight transport field and to review urban fraight transport sustainability initiatives. The number of initiatives that is succesfully implemented in practice turns out te be quite low. In the review and the following analysis, we try to find the barriers for succesful implementation of the initiatives in practice. In the seond part we examine the impacts of the most commonly used local sustainability policies. Six time-window scenarios and their impacts on the economical, environmental and social sustainability are examined based on a multiple case study. Time-window regulations increase both the environmental and distribution costs. Retail chains are affected differently by time-window pressure and vehicle restrictions due to differences in their logical concept. based on an experiment we examine the effects of retailers' logical decisions in combination with local sustainability policies. Next, we examine the degree to which retailers are able te deal with problems caused by time-windows. Combining the primary and secondary distribution, i.e. factory gate pricing, results in more sustainable distribution operations for the retailer and in less sensivity towards time-window regulations

Linking the knowledge economy, urban intensity and transport in post-industrial cities with a case study of Perth, Western Australia

Cities in post-industrial economies are characterised by a multi-layered intensification of knowledge. This intensification occurs through: • agglomeration of knowledge economic activity; • human capital knowledge; and • the means of knowledge exchange i.e. ICT and transport. This thesis proposes an intensification of key walkable urban centres, particularly universities. Knowledge urban intensification is heavily reliant on rail and walking transport intensification