Sustainability and efficiency in urban mobility: an international comparison

Abstract

After an initial introduction concerning generic sustainability and its various definitions, I explain the sustainable mobility and its charactheristics, why it's important and the different approaches to achieve it. Next I will focus on urban mobility and I'll describe twenty actions to improve it, published by the Commission of European Communities in 2009, covering topics like sustainable urban mobility plan, the relation between attitudes of people and their travel behavior, lower and zero emission vehicles, urban freight transport policies and the CIVITAS Initiative. Then I'll present land use planning as a solution to excessive extension of infrastructures and urban sprawl, and I'll describe also the concept of “traffic evaporation”. For the sperimental part, I compared the urban mobility of eight European cities measuring the average trip time between three main attractors whithin each city, with private car and public transport, and the average cost of every trip. I conclude the thesis showing the relative competitiveness of the public transport and finding out if (and how much) the cities that took part in the CIVITAS project have a better urban mobility than the others.