An assessment and critique of capabilities for examining the long-term social sustainability of transport and land-use strategies

The development of transport and land use strategies tends to rely, to a large degree, on inputs from large strategic models. Although it is commonplace for such models to assess the economic and environmental impacts of transport strategies, few provide any real understanding of their social impacts. This paper reports on a study that aims to improve how the social sustainability of transport strategies is considered. The study is part of a wider project conducted to improve the ability to assess the overall sustainability of transport decisions. It describes the four-stage method that was adopted. The approach is pioneering, focusing as it does on accessibility to key services and facilities as a primary measure of social sustainability. Nevertheless, the approach has a number of serious limitations in both selecting indicators and applying them in practice. It is also clear from the experiences with adapting the outputs of state-of-the-art models that the technical capacity for assessing the social implications of transport continues to fall well short of the technical capacity for assessing the economic and environmental impacts of strategies. A series of recommendations to improve the technical capacity in this respect is provided