Sustainability in traffic in general

Sustainability covers economic, environmental and social dimensions. Therefore, sustainable transport development must embrace aspects from all three areas.

The most important criteria used to assess whether traffic is ecological, economically viable and socially just are the following:

• amount of greenhouse gases produced, such as CO2
• noise exposure and atmospheric load
• land consumption and impact on landscape and living space
• real costs
• price of transport services
• accessibility of regional centres using public transport services
• participation of population in decision-making

The scenario of sustainable mobility provided by the German Federal Environment Agency thus includes five essential tasks:

• Avoid traffic by reducing travel distance
• Make traffic and transportation more efficient through better utilisation of roads and vehicles
• Shift traffic to less environmentally harmful modes of transport (PrT to PuT)
• Handle traffic in a more eco-friendly way, through more economical, quiet and safe traffic flows
• Extensive traffic calming and a housing and land consumption strategy harmonised with public transport (reduction of land consumption for housing and transport purposes)

The sustainability strategy issued by the German Government is formulated as follows:

"With the aim of creating sustainable traffic and transport development and thereby equally accounting for economical, ecological and social factors, transport policy faces three distinct challenges:

• maintaining a high level of mobility and at the same time reducing traffic loads produced by economy and society in order to slow down dynamic traffic growth,
• handling the remaining traffic growth efficiently and ecologically friendly and
• continuing to reduce the traffic emissions harmful to the environment and nature, people's health and quality of life".
  
  (German Government 2002a:181)

• Sustainability in the business field Traffic Software
  Intelligent transport concepts save our resources – in both private and public transport.
  
  
• Sustainability in the business field Transport Consulting
  PTV offers consulting services to public and private sector clients as well as transport operators and assists them in creating sustainable transport concepts.
  
  
• Sustainability in the business field Logistics Software
  Eco-friendly transports and cost-saving concepts. PTV assists logistics companies in their efforts to green their operations.