Sustainable urban transportation: a model-based approach

Transportation and its environmental impacts are a major component of urban environmental management. At the same time, transportation and mobility are an important part of urban economics and the quality of life. To analyze urban transportation and its environmental impacts, a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach is needed. No single model can cover the range of spatial and temporal scales and processes involved. This leads to a multi-tiered approach and a cascade of models to describe alternative urban development and transportation scenarios and their multicriteria assessment and comparative analysis. This paper describes the methodology and application examples of Sustainable Urban Transportation (SUTRA) (http://www.ess.co.at/SUTRA/) a City of Tomorrow project under the European Union Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development Research Programme. The primary objective of SUTRA was to develop a consistent and comprehensive model-based approach.