The Noble Quest: Navigating Toward Sustainable Transportation

Abstract:Societies around the world consistently enjoy better living standards as product choices, availability, quality, and cost are continuously improved. As lifestyles improve and the world population grows, so does the amount of transportation necessary to support this lifestyle. Despite our noble quest to adopt more sustainable transportation, and despite countless innovations and improvements, the results are inadequate; carbon reduction is insufficient to curtail our growth trajectory, much less achieve the aggressive zero emission targets set by companies and governments. To examine this problem, we revisit transportation as a derived demand, a principle which has been accepted for decades, but largely forgotten in sustainable transportation research. In fact, transportation has evolved so much that some scholars are debating the significance of this age-old assumption. This suggests that transportation researchers take a fresh look at the nature, changes, and evolving trends of transportation demand and possibly focus less on sustainable transport and more on adjusting the demand for sustainable transportation.