Planning for Sustainable Mobility with Personal Rapid Transit in Small European Cities - Highway and Urban Environment - page 5

What is Sustainable Mobility ?
Sustainable Mobility is the ability to meet society's need to move freely, gain
access, communicate, trade and establish relationships without sacrificing other
essential human or ecological values, today or in the future [5] . All of this must be
achieved in a cost-effective manner.
Interaction Between Mobility, Land-Use, Energy
and Behavior Change
Development is closely related to movement. To undertake commercial exchange,
access public services, or engage in recreation and entertainment, society relies upon
the ability to move persons, goods, or information from one location to another. Cities
are a deliberate concentration of these exchange opportunities in order to increase
both the diversity and accessibility of exchange opportunities.
Planners have long known that land use and transport are intertwined and cor-
relate with energy consumption, particularly in urban areas. There is an inseparable
link between establishing locations for human functions, the use of space, and
the impact on the way people travel. Nevertheless, land use, transport and energy
issues are too often viewed and addressed separately [6] . As a result, opportunities
to collectively address individual concerns in each sector are lost. Planning
approaches are often described as adversarial or lacking in proper representation
[7] . Forrester states that “a systematic approach to analyzing and managing urban
land use, transport, and energy systems requires systems thinking : the evaluation of
interrelated and complex systems over time” [8] .
Sustainability Principles
In the late 1980s Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt led a network of leading Swedish scientists
from a variety of disciplines, which came up with a principle-based and systemic
definition of sustainability. Over the years these principles have been successfully
adopted by several organizations and communities. As basic or first order principles (SPs),
they intend to be: (i) based on a scientifically agreed upon view of the world; (ii) necessary
to achieve sustainability; (iii) sufficient to achieve sustainability; (iv) general to structure
all societal activities relevant to sustainability; (v) concrete to guide action and serve
as directional aides in problem analysis; (vi) non-overlapping or mutually exclusive in
order to enable comprehension and structured analysis of the issues [9] .
Sustainability Principle #1 : IN A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, NATURE IS NOT
SUBJECT TO SYSTEMATICALLY INCREASING CONCENTRATIONS OF
SUBSTANCES EXTRACTED FROM THE EARTH'S CRUST.