SUMMA - Sustainable Mobility, policy Measures and Assessment
Overview
Background & policy context:
There is an increasing demand for transport and mobility in our society. At the same time there is a desire for cleaner environment and nature preservation and concern for the welfare of future generations. Policymakers have to accommodate these conflicting emotions by balancing the positive and negative impacts of transport. SUMMA helps policymakers to do so by giving support in developing more efficient and effective transport policies that fulfil the need for mobility while reducing transport’s adverse impacts to more acceptable levels.
Objectives:
The SUMMA project is designed to support policymakers by providing them with a consistent framework for making trade-offs, where appropriate, among the economic, environmental and social components of sustainability. SUMMA will provide an assessment of policy options for promoting sustainable transport and mobility. To achieve this, SUMMA will:
- Define and operationalise sustainable mobility and transport, develop an appropriate system, and define a set of indicators for monitoring the environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainable transport and mobility;
- Assess the scale and scope of the problems of sustainability in the transport sector;
- Assess policy measures in the White Paper on transport policy, as well as other policy measures, that are to be found in the literature, that can be used to promote sustainable transport and mobility at the national, regional, and city levels.
Methodology:
In order to fulfill its objectives SUMMA adopted a two-step approach. The first step was to analyse the problem and to develop a conceptual design for monitoring and modelling sustainable transport and mobility, without fully taking into account the feasibility of its implementation. In the second step, the conceptual design was implemented, given the limitations of data and information, as fully as possible and then used to assess the contribution of several policies to promoting and realizing sustainable transport.
The project is divided into 6 sections:
- Given that the term sustainability has many different aspects, the aim of this section is to review these different aspects and distil what is relevant for sustainable transport. Also nine European-wide research projects on sustainable transport and mobility were selected and reviewed.
- In this section a theoretical framework and a structured approach was set up for the project. For policymakers to determine whether or not their current policies or changes in policy would lead toward sustainability, they would need to know what aspects of world need to be sustained, and how to measure these aspects. Then, if some of these aspects are determined to be not sustainable, the policymakers need to decide what policy measures to apply to influence these aspects in a positive direction. Operationalising this process requires a theoretical framework and a structured approach.
- In this part of the project the outcomes of interest and the selected indicators are described. The outcome indicators are needed to monitor or describe changes in the outcomes of interests. The main criterion used in identifying the indicators has been their importance, relevance and completeness in measuring and monitoring the outcomes of interest. Availability of data or methods to calculate these indicators was not taken as a decisive factor, although it certainly has had an impact on the selection.
- In this part of the project a model was set up. A model is required to represent the transport system. Ideally, the model to represent the transport system would be able to model all policy measures and provide the outcomes of interest with sufficient detail and accuracy. Additionally the model should cover the whole of Europe and be a useful and practical tool for policy makers to support their decision-making.
- One goal is a generalized, non-quantitat
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