Decision-Making in Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning: Common Practice and Future Directions

This paper highlights the challenges for cities in selecting sustainable transport and mobility measures due to their cost-effectiveness. It focuses on the implica­tions for measure selection during SUMPs when cost-benefit analysis is the primary motivation for choosing a particular intervention.

The article first articulates the challenges of determining a transport project’s viabil­ity and then proceeds to five case studies of sustainable urban mobility planning and to the role that project appraisal played in related policy-making processes. Lastly, the author discusses the use of cost-benefit analysis versus multi-criteria analysis for measure selections and concludes that the latter is the superior methodology within a SUMP process.

Although the study is based on research in five European cities, the key findings are of equal relevance to developing countries. In fact, the paper’s main message seems particularly vital for many developing countries that prioritize economic sustainability over social or environmental sustainability. Thus, the paper highlights the common mistake of using only cost-benefit analysis to select measures that should be notably avoided in developing countries

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