Making urban travel sustainable: Travel reductions are needed

Many cities around the world are aiming to be zero emission or environmentally sustainable, particularly cities in the Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. This paper contributes to the literature by using a systems approach to argue for a wider view, not only for the full range of deleterious effects of urban transport in a given city itself, but also for its impact on possibly distant locations that supply transport inputs and receive its waste products. The paper uses the published literature to first examine the various adverse effects of urban travel, and then to critically evaluate the proposed technology-based solutions. The main finding is that all these solutions are found wanting to some extent, especially given the limited time frame available; hence, for urban sustainability, large travel reductions are thus needed. It then looks at a very different approach: reductions in urban vehicular travel, particularly by car. Four approaches considered (changing urban land-use, reducing private vehicle travel convenience, introducing carbon taxes, using information technology as a travel substitute), This paper concludes that various measures for decreasing the convenience of car travel, such as by cutting speed limits and parking spaces, as being the most equitable in OECD cities, and potentially capable of rapid implementation.