Assessing the Sustainability Potential of EU Transport Networks

Abstract

Sustainable transportation of goods is high both on the European and the international agendas. Identification of transport bottlenecks and their management towards achieving sustainable operations is a core focus in the European Union (EU) transport policy. In this context, there is a need to develop and implement integrated approaches for the assessment of the current performance of EU transport chains with respect to sustainability, and to provide directions for improvements. The EU funded project 'Supporting EU's Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan on Green Corridors Issues' (SuperGreen), aims to support the development of sustainable transport networks by fulfilling requirements covering environmental, technical, economical, social, and spatial planning aspects. As part of several measures to accomplish this, SuperGreen evaluates a series of transport corridors covering some representative regions and main transport routes through Europe by investigating their greening potential via application of new technologies, techniques, and procedures. In this paper, the authors present the methodology developed and followed within SuperGreen for the assessment and benchmarking of transport chains in accordance with sustainability oriented criteria. An integrated picture of the baseline EU transport chains is created via performance measures related to cost, emissions, efficiency, frequency, and reliability of service. As a result, the challenges towards improved sustainability of EU freight transportation are revealed. Further, within a non-exhaustive collection of emerging greening plans and technologies, potential solutions are identified and proposed. Then, the performance of the transport chains is re-assessed and compared to the baseline conditions on the basis of the aforementioned key performance measures. The methodology is applied to three long distance transport chains across Europe, proving the ability to quantitatively assess real-life cases and suggest practical solutions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.