How sustainable is research on sustainable mobility: a review of five years of 'Urban Transport'

In the past few years policy makers seem to pay more attention to the development of sustainable mobility. One of the main reasons for this change of thinking is due to the deterioration of the environmental conditions in urban areas. However, we think that the research also plays an important part here. Therefore, with respect to this topic an inventory was made concerning the past five years of the Urban Transport conferences. Using a system's view on transportation, we classified all the research contributions related to the topic sustainable mobility. A distinction is made between people and freight. Longitudinal research can make it more clear to us whether the attentions or differences concerning this topic have changed in relation to the system's view. In our research we try to identify whether some research efforts have (not) been successfully implemented in practice. To put it more precisely, we will analyse whether managerial, cultural, economic, sociographical, or geographical circumstances have influenced or catalysed some concepts, policies or technologies. For future research it is just a start to evaluate former initiatives regarding sustainable mobility. However, by learning from the past we can determine which technologies, policy measures and concepts still have a sustainable character.