Sustainable Transport as a Key Ingredient of Sustainable Development

There’s this common thinking that sustainable development and the efforts that come with it will only put a focus on responsible use of natural resources, recycling and anything about the environment. Sustainability efforts isn’t just about the environment, protecting the resources for future generation’s use or helping less developed countries catch up with developed ones. It’s also about highly specific building blocks including transportation. This has been highlighted once again in the recently-concluded Rio+20 Summit in Rio Janeiro where this topic was put front and center through the initiatives of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. It is said that the current direction of funding and governmental policies only focus on sprawling, air pollution, inequality in the access of transportation and unsustainable transportation solutions.

Due to these concerns, it is high time that there’s a change in direction for policy makers to choose sustainable transport. And the round-table discussion headed by the ITDP clearly outlined what should be the general objectives that should be adopted by policy makers in the government.

• Reduce unnecessary travel through the adoption of smart planning of the transportation sector;
• More research on how to improve the efficiency of vehicles, fuels and transport hubs;
• Recognition of the sustainable transport as an important element of sustainable development;
• Use the experience of India and Mexico as a template for their national urban transport investment programs.

All these general objectives should always form part of the strategic plan of any government to come up with a greener transportation and in the process help in sustainable development efforts.

Related articles

• Rio+20: Growing Cities Get Focus, Become Targets for Global Sustainable Development Efforts (infrastructuredevelopment.wordpress.com)
• Development Banks to Fund Sustainable Transport (voanews.com)
• UN bike ride highlights importance of sustainable transport (feeds.bignewsnetwork.com)
• Why Transportation Needs to Be on the Rio+20 Agenda (thecityfix.com)
• Rio+20: Three requirements for sustainable transport (rtcc.org)
• Population growth, climate change drive need for urban rethink (trust.org)