Quantifying transport sustainability: development of an index

Quantifying sustainability of urban transport is important as evidenced by a growing number of studies working on measuring sustainability in transportation. This thesis first reviewed major initiatives reported in the current literature, which dealt with the challenge of measuring transport sustainability using long lists of indicators. To overcome the issue of using large number of indicators for evaluation, this thesis developed a method for obtaining a composite transport sustainability index based on three aspects: environmental, social and economic, each one defined by a set of indicators. Ten sustainability indicators relevant to urban transport were selected by assessing and reviewing the past research and based on available data for Melbourne. These indicators, which can be categorised as environmental, social and economic indicators, are depletion of non-renewable resources, GHG emissions, other air pollutants related to transport, land consumption by transport, accessibility, fatalities and injuries related to traffic accidents, mortality effects of air pollutants, car ownership costs and operation costs of public transport, vehicle and general costs of accidents and benefits of walking and cycling. To quantify selected indicators, land use/transport interaction model was developed to estimate car ownership, vehicle kilometre travelled (VKT) and modal split, and consequently transport energy consumption, emissions and its related social and economic impacts. In the next step, the indicators were integrated into transportation environmental impact index (TEII), transportation social impact index (TSII), transportation economic impact index (TCII) and then into transport sustainability index (ICST) in a way that overcomes the limitations of normalisation, weighting and aggregation methods. In the final step, transport sustainability indices were developed for three different urban planning scenarios (base-case scenario, activity-centres scenario, fringe-focus scenario) for 2030, to find the most appropriate approach for urban development in the future. Indices based on the method developed in this study could help organisations for better understanding of the measures and activities that influence the sustainability of urban transport