Developing a scorecard for sustainable transport : a Cape Town application

[摘要] Globally, transport and its associated ills are creating urban landscapes that can bestbe described as unhealthy, unfriendly and unsustainable. The unsustainable nature ofcurrent transportation practices are most keenly displayed in four key areas, namely:the pending oil peak; global climate change; environmental degradation and socialdeprivation. South Africa is no exception to these impacts, but also suffers an extradisadvantage of demonstrating very little knowledge of more sustainabletransportation option in terms of its planning regime.This study endeavours to improve the state of sustainability in transportation planningby developing a user-friendly and pragmatic transportation sustainability appraisalmechanism and testing this mechanism on a real-life case. In order to develop such anappraisal mechanism, the theory of sustainable development is firstly examined toprovide direction to the study, followed by an attempt to distil the most pertinentprinciples of sustainable transport from the literature. These principles form theobjectives which the appraisal mechanism aims to measure sustainability against.Owing to the poor level of awareness regarding sustainable transport practices inSouth Africa, a discussion on selected benchmark sustainable transport practices isalso included in the study and consequently added to the appraisal mechanism. To testits operability, the appraisal mechanism is finally applied to Cape Town's DraftIntegrated Transport Plan (ITP) 2006-2011.The study indicates that the ITP is a reasonably sustainable transport plan, with theexception of its affordability and public participation aspects. These exceptions are attributed to the ITP either not properly addressing these aspects, or due to the ITP notproviding enough information on these aspects. Finally, the study found that thedeveloped appraisal mechanism is operable in the field of transportation planning, butsuggests that the mechanism be further developed and refined to improve its value andeffectiveness. A transdisciplinary process involving the input of communitystakeholders and specialists is identified as major area for such development

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University