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Sustainability
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Using New Technologies to Make Urban Transport Sustainable
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Using New Technologies to Make Urban Transport Sustainable

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 12271

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Adriano Alessandrini

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
DICeA - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Ambientale, Università degli Studi di Firenze, 50139 Firenze, Italy
Interests: innovative transport system; vehicle automation; vehicle and driver environmental impact; transport sustainability
Dr. Fabio Cignini

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Energy Efficiency Department (DUEE-SIST-DIG), ENEA Research Centre of Casaccia, 00123 Rome, Italy
Interests: energy policy; low-environmental-impact transport; energetic data elaboration; urban transport; vehicle automation; innovative transport systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Since its definition by the World Commission on Environment and Development Commission (or Brundtland Commission) in 1987, sustainable development has been the goal of all developed countries. Mobility and transport remain a key challenge for sustainable development, as economic development is normally coupled with transport demand growth, and transport impacts are among the key unsustainability causes. In metropolitan areas, this contrast is even more evident as a city economic development is usually connected with new settlements, new infrastructures, and more individual and longer trips which lead to congestion, pollutant emissions, and safety problems.

New technologies, including but not limited to vehicle automation, battery electric vehicles, and communication technologies, have promised to provide solutions for decades, but such solutions can be finally at hand.

This Special Issue will deal with technology, policy, and organisational innovations in urban transport and mobility to make urban transport sustainable. It will feature ideas, projects, simulations, and real live demonstration results about urban transport innovations and their impacts in terms of sustainability. It will have an interdisciplinary approach and, unlike specialised journals which address one specific subject, this Special Issue will combine energy, automation, and communication technologies with infrastructural, organisational, and policy issues to cover the full extent of the epic challenge of making urban transport sustainable.

Prof. Adriano Alessandrini
Dr. Fabio Cignini
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainability
  • urban transport
  • vehicle automation
  • battery electric vehicles
  • transport services
  • transport policies

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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27 pages, 3286 KiB  
Article
A Paradigm Shift for a Transition to Sustainable Urban Transport
by Francesco Filippi
Sustainability 2022, 14(5), 2853; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14052853 - 01 Mar 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 5679
Abstract
The traffic-engineering methods of planning based on the predict-and-provide principle have self-enforcing effects of induced traffic and an unhealthy environment for humans as well as for the planet. The paper aims to demonstrate that such methods keep cities stuck in a sort of [...] Read more.
The traffic-engineering methods of planning based on the predict-and-provide principle have self-enforcing effects of induced traffic and an unhealthy environment for humans as well as for the planet. The paper aims to demonstrate that such methods keep cities stuck in a sort of path dependency with transport technologies and urban environment and to find evidence that something is changing in theory, trends, and practice. A systematic and extensive literature review has been used to identify and understand the problems, to recognise the changes taking place, and to examine the solutions. The main findings are the causes of how these problems could have happened and continue to do so regardless of the huge negative effects and the recognition that a paradigm shift is emerging as the sum of methods and achievements developed by the community of academics, experts, practitioners, policymakers, and urban communities. The findings can have practical, effective implications as the determinants of a new transport policy paradigm that shows the way out of the trap of path dependency. The originality of the approach lies in having expanded and applied the concept of anomalies of the theory to the adverse effects of technologies and the mismatch between people and the modern urban environment. The new paradigm is already showing its practical effectiveness in solving real problems by adapting cities and technologies to human nature and developing a more holistic human-centric planning method. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Using New Technologies to Make Urban Transport Sustainable)
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24 pages, 5625 KiB  
Article
How Many Electric Vehicles Are Needed to Reach CO2 Emissions Goals? A Case Study from Montreal, Canada
by Pierre Laffont, E. Owen D. Waygood and Zachary Patterson
Sustainability 2022, 14(3), 1441; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14031441 - 27 Jan 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3227
Abstract
In the province of Quebec, Canada where the electricity is nearly carbon-free, the road transport sector represents 35.6% of all emissions. As such, electric vehicles (EVs) have been proposed as a means to reduce such emissions. However, it is not clear how many [...] Read more.
In the province of Quebec, Canada where the electricity is nearly carbon-free, the road transport sector represents 35.6% of all emissions. As such, electric vehicles (EVs) have been proposed as a means to reduce such emissions. However, it is not clear how many conventional vehicles (CVs) would need to change to electric in order to meet the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction target of reducing 1990 CO2 emissions by 37.5% by 2030 in the province. In fact, various considerations exist such as which vehicles will change and how those vehicles are used. This articleaddresses this issue in the case of Montreal, Canada. First, to create a baseline, direct emissions by all personal vehicles in Montreal in 2018 are calculated using data from the 2018 origin-destination (OD) survey and provincial vehicle registration. Next, five scenarios are studied to calculate the variations in the number of EVs needed in the fleet in order to achieve provincial targets. The most optimistic scenario shows that roughly 49% of the fleet would need to change. The most pessimistic scenario estimates that almost 73% of the fleet would need to be converted to EVs. It can be concluded that the strategy used can have a great impact on how many vehicles need to be replaced in the fleet. However, all simulations show that the necessary replacements are far from negligible. It must surely be coupled with other actions such as reducing veh.km travelled (vkmt) or increasing public transport use. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Using New Technologies to Make Urban Transport Sustainable)
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Other

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19 pages, 286 KiB  
Essay
Opportunities, Challenges, and Uncertainties in Urban Road Transport Automation
by Steven E. Shladover
Sustainability 2022, 14(3), 1853; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14031853 - 06 Feb 2022
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2547
Abstract
Automated driving has attracted intense attention in the media and among the general public, based on extremely optimistic predictions from some industry participants, but these have started to become more realistic in the last couple of years, after the “hype cycle” for automation [...] Read more.
Automated driving has attracted intense attention in the media and among the general public, based on extremely optimistic predictions from some industry participants, but these have started to become more realistic in the last couple of years, after the “hype cycle” for automation peaked. This paper explains the opportunities for Automated Driving System (ADS) technology to improve the urban transport of people and goods, together with the challenges that will limit the scope and timing of the deployment of urban ADS. The discussion emphasizes the diversity of ADS applications and services, each of which has its own opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties, leading to diverse deployment scopes and schedules. The associated challenges are sufficiently daunting that ADS deployment will lag behind electrification and connectivity, leaving more time for cities to prepare for it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Using New Technologies to Make Urban Transport Sustainable)
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