Identification and quantification of sustainability performance measures

Abstract

Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 14 - 16 July 2003 "National issues affecting the movement of people and goods - strategic approaches", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. ABSTRACT: Economic, social and environmental challenges across the world have given rise to the concepts of sustainable development. For sustainable transportation to be successfully implemented it is essential that the concepts are adequately understood, quantified and applied. The focus of this paper was to show how performance measures for sustainability could be quantified in both a developed and a developing nation using new and innovative technologies. It was shown that the concepts of sustainable transportation are universal across nations although the specific needs, available technologies, and funding sources differ between developed and developing nations. For this research, a corridor in a city of a developed nation and one in a developing nation were selected as test beds. The corridor in the developed nation is the US-290 corridor in Houston, Texas whereas the corridor in the developing nation is the PWV-9 freeway in Tshwane, South Africa. A wide variety of innovative data collection techniques were investigated. It was found that the data collection methods vary greatly in terms of sophistication, accuracy, and cost. Automatic vehicle identification (AVI) systems and cellular phone tracking have been identified to have the most potential, both for developed and developing nations. It was further shown that basic data such as speed, travel time, and travel time variability could be used to quantify a wide range of sustainable transportation performance measures.