Sustainability assessment at the transportation planning level: Performance measures and indexes

While the definition of a sustainable transportation system is varied, there is emerging consensus that transportation system sustainability should capture attributes of system effectiveness and system impacts on economic development, environmental integrity, and social quality of life. Sustainability assessment can be incorporated at the planning level in order to influence decision making, and support policies that affect regional sustainability. This paper reviews methodologies that can be applied in sustainability assessment in transportation planning in order to shed light on the procedures being used to incorporate sustainability more effectively in the planning process. Using data from the Atlanta Metropolitan Region, the study identifies performance measures based on sustainability issues and regional goals and evaluates proposed transportation and land use alternatives. The study evaluates and discusses several performance measures and aggregates them into indexes representing four parameters of sustainability: system effectiveness, environmental, economic, and social impacts, to enable visualization and assessment of tradeoffs and dominance for the competing alternatives. This study is potentially useful to agencies interested in understanding the range of tools being used for sustainability assessment, expanding or refining their performance measures to capture sustainability in transportation planning, and using them in evaluating tradeoffs among competing alternatives as well as in identifying dominant alternatives.

► Sustainability captures system effectiveness and its economic, environmental, social impacts.
► Sustainability can be incorporated at the planning level in order to influence decision making.
► The study presents emerging guidance on the critical elements of sustainability evaluation.
► Sustainability performance measures can be effectively evaluated in a multicriteria framework.