Special Issue on Transportation, the Environment, and Sustainability

Many sustainable development challenges exist domestically and internationally, and yet many opportunities for improvement exist at multiple scales of application. Sustainable development should improve our standard of living without compromising the quality of our lives, communities, and natural environments. Sustainability issues are numerous and include access to energy, clean water and sanitation, climate change, public health threats, poverty, ecosystem and land surface degradation, biodiversity and habitat loss, social equity, and governance and institutions. Systemic initiatives to address these issues are also appearing. More and more nations, agencies, and other decision-making entities are adopting policy objectives in priority areas and developing performance-based approaches to achieve them. Transportation is no exception to having sustainability issues and potential solutions. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), over the 2007–2035 period, world demand for liquid fuels is projected to be higher than the demand for any other type of energy, increasing by 28% in this period. Despite rising prices, the use of fuels is expected to rise by 45% in the transportation sector (EIA 2010). In the United States, the transportation sector consumes over a fourth of the total energy budget and over 70% of the total petroleum budget (EIA 2009). It is also the second largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions after electricity (Newman et al. 2009). Clearly, transportation is a critical driver for sustainable development.

We are pleased to bring you this special section on transportation, sustainability, and the environment. Our intent is to catalog some of the serious efforts being made to address sustainability issues in and through the transportation sector, including greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, energy consumption, air quality, and quality of life. Deakin discusses innovative legislation to tackle climate change in the state of California and the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gudmundsson, Lawler, Tight, and Figueroa examine how sustainable transport policy frameworks deal with greenhouse gases in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Meyer and Weigel examine the current practice for looking at transportation system adaptation to climate change and present an adaptive systems framework for U.S. transportation agencies to respond to changing environmental conditions. Ramani, Zeitsman, Knowles, and Quadrifoglio discuss a pragmatic application of multicriteria evaluation to a highway corridor to assess progress based on consensually developed performance measures. Hillman, Janson, and Ramaswami tackle the spatial allocation of greenhouse gas emissions at the city scale, and Southworth and Sonnenberg estimate carbon footprints for highway travel in various metropolitan areas in the United States. These papers collectively represent good examples of sustainability priorities in transportation and actions being taken to address them at multiple levels. We hope that this issue succeeds in broadening, deepening, and enriching the ongoing discourse on transportation, sustainability, and the environment, and in advancing research, practice, and policy implementation. We hope that this special section will inspire additional work in the area of transportation, sustainability, and the environment. Moreover, we hope that reports of this work will continue to appear in the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering. Adjo Amekudzi will be staying on as an associate editor for such papers.