An assessment and critique of capabilities for examining the long-term social sustainability of transport and land-use strategies

When transport and land-use strategies are developed they tend to rely, to a large degree, on the inputs from large strategic models. Whilst it is commonplace for such models to assess the economic and environmental impacts of transport strategies, very few provide any real understanding of their social impacts. This paper reports on a study that aims to improve how we consider the social sustainability of transport strategies. The study is part of a wider project to improve our assessment of the overall sustainability of transport decisions. It describes the four-staged method that was adopted. The approach is pioneering, focusing as it does on accessibility to key services and facilities as a primary measure of social sustainability. Nevertheless, there are a number of serious limitations in the approach, both in selecting indicators and applying them in practice. It is also clear from our experiences of adapting the outputs of state-of-the-art models that the technical capacity for assessing the social implications of transport continue to fall well short of those that assess the economic and environmental impacts of strategies. A series of recommendations to improve capacity in this respect is provided.