2134/7696
Nicodemus Herb Castillo
Nicodemus Herb
Castillo
A methodological approach for indicator-based sustainable transport assessment
Loughborough University
2011
Sustainable transport
Sustainability assessment
Indicators
Multi-criteria decision analysis
Analytic hierarchy process
participatory transport planning
Built Environment and Design not elsewhere classified
2011-01-11 09:57:33
Thesis
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/A_methodological_approach_for_indicator-based_sustainable_transport_assessment/9453869
Sustainable transport is now a popular goal of transport planning. As with any aspiration,
systems and mechanisms are required to assess and gauge success in achieving this policy
goal. There is increasing reliance on sustainable transport indicators as appropriate tools
for this purpose. The usefulness and credibility of any indicator-based assessment will
undoubtedly depend on the specific indicators utilised. As such, indicators must be
selected carefully to maximise their contribution to the sustainable transport decision
making process. A review of current applications of sustainable transport indicators has
revealed however, that they are typically selected in an ad hoc and arbitrary fashion.
Development of a framework that facilitates transparent and systematic indicator
selection would therefore represent a significant advance in transport research. In that
regard, this thesis presents the Evaluative and Logical Approach to Sustainable Transport
Indicator Compilation (ELASTIC), a methodological framework which provides a
flexible, participatory and systematic mechanism for identifying and selecting key
sustainable transport indicators. The output of ELASTIC is the Transport Sustainability
Profile (TSP), a small un-aggregated suite of sustainable transport indicators which
together can provide a snapshot of the sustainability of a transport system. Using various
multi-criteria and statistical techniques, ELASTIC applies a robust process to evaluate
and select indicators based on their analytical soundness and their relevance to key
objectives of sustainable transport. A generic and transferable tool, ELASTIC is capable
of application at different geographical scales as well as to non-transport sustainability
assessment. For the purpose of this research, the framework is demonstrated through
application to England, UK where the judgements of relevant Academics and Transport
Planners are elicited and entered into the ELASTIC framework to systematically select a
subset of 15 indicators from an initial set of 200. By disaggregating the sample of
stakeholders into regional groupings, different context-specific suites of indicators for the
regional groupings were also derived. The demonstration confirms ELASTIC to be an
inclusive and practical approach to compiling a suite of sustainable transport indicators
specific to context and which reflects the unique values of key stakeholders.