Abstract
Economic development typically entails the growth of freight and passenger transport, which causes traffic and congestion. As a consequence, besides evident socio-economic benefits, increasing demand for transport might generate increasing use of energy that, with few exceptions, means an increasing consumption of nonrenewable sources and increasing emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases (Janic, Transport Rev 26(1):81–104, 2006).
In this framework, sustainable transportation refers to the technological and nontechnological solutions and measures aimed at reducing the adverse effects connected to mobility at both local and global scales. In particular, sustainable transportation encompasses solutions and measures that range from reduced demand for transport, to the use of energy efficient transport modes, from the reduction of emissions in densely inhabited areas, to the reduction of the global scale environmental footprint.
Like most anthropic activities, transportation has an impact on natural, social, and economic capital. Given that the substitutability of natural, social, and economic capital is technically impossible or inefficient and/or normatively undesirable (Neumayer E (2003) Weak versus strong sustainability: exploring the limits of two opposing paradigms. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham), the final goal of sustainable transportation is thus to maximize alignment to sustainability policies as a way to attempt to minimize irreversible impacts and manage inevitable trade-offs between the three pillars of sustainable development.
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Chirieleison, C., Rizzi, F. (2023). Sustainable Transportation. In: Idowu, S.O., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25984-5_134
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