Urban Transport Sustainability in Mauritius: A Balanced Scorecard

Abstract

Mauritius’s urban land transport is of particular interest, mainly from two key corner points. Firstly, the transport sector is the third largest contributing sector to Mauritian economy and the urban land transport is recognized as one of the most important drivers for growth of Mauritius, especially because of the high reliance of other economic backbone sectors including industry, finance and tourism on urban land transport. Secondly, the urban transport in Mauritius exhibits many of the transport problems as faced in other global rapidly growing developing cities, such as worsening traffic congestion, traveler dissatisfaction on public modes, rapid growth of private motorization, air pollution and urban sprawling. While for a long term sustainable Mauritian economy the performance of urban transport is crucial, there is a lack of integrated study targeting to enhance the sustainability performance of urban transport. Therefore, a holistic sustainability evaluation is needed for this sector in order to identify the critical challenging areas, which will be helpful in setting off effective measures to enhance long term sustainability in this sector. In the past, studies mainly focused on certain aspects while others remained ignored resulting in the lack of a balanced evaluation. The aim of this study is to evaluate the sustainability of Mauritius urban transport using a Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard reviews and assesses Mauritius’s urban transport with an integrated framework of sustainability. Results show that, the overall sustainability performance of Mauritius’s urban transport is marginally moderate and the performance of sustainability indicators fall in either moderate or poor categories. The major moderate performing areas include safety, social equity, affordability, employment growth, impact on global environment, energy consumption, revenue enhancement, economic growth, efficiency of commercial goods transport, promotion of green vehicles, awareness and education, leadership and policy, investment effectiveness and skill development and training. In addition, the marginally moderate performing areas, where improvements are highly necessary, include management of transport infrastructures and parking facilities, noise control, external cost savings, integration among passenger modes, and promotion of vehicle sharing practices. On the other hand, areas that have performed poor and need immediate improvement include level of service, congestion management, air pollution, integration of land-use and transport, integration among institutions, promotion of public and non-motorized transport, control over private vehicles, emission control, public participation, innovation, technological deployment in infrastructures and vehicles, incident management, smart road pricing and traveler information.

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