In this paper, a different interpretation of sustainable transportation, is introduced, in which sustainability with respect to transportation sector for the selected countries is evaluated. This interpretation characterizes "sustainable development" through "harmonic development". It means sustainable development with special focus on transportation can be measured by the degree of conformity between environment, economy, and social aspects on one hand, and transportation on the other hand. The best indicator to perform such a measurement is elasticity. The database used for the study encompasses a series of national indicators for each country Seventy nine countries were initially selected for detailed analysis for the period of 1980 -1995. The data have been extracted from centralized information sources of international agencies. The key dimensions of sustainable development i.e. social, environmental, and economic characteristics are used. Firstly, a set of sustainable transportation indicators is introduced. These indicators, which in fact are elasticities, show the relative change of non-transportation variables with respect to transportation ones. Second composite indices of three non-transportation groups with respect to four transportation modes are calculated. The composite indices are then aggregated by the Concordance Analysis Technique to achieve comprehensive transportation sustainability indices of countries, and according to these values, the countries are compared, ranked, and classified. Mathematical and statistical analyses of the database support the study quantitatively. The results for the selected indicators and countries show that from sustainable transportation point of view and based on the above-mentioned interpretation of sustainable development, United States is in the ranked first, and Sierra Leon is last among the subset of 79 countries with non-missing data. The results of the study depict an overall scheme for comparative assessment of transportation sustainability of the countries.

Many governments in the developing world face the social and economic consequences of road accidents and mortalities. Hence, more precise evaluation of regional programs to reduce road fatalities has been a concern for many safety professionals. Road safety performance is often measured using various extensions of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in particular the model proposed by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (CCR), which deals only with the radial efficiency as the objective function neither taking into account input excesses nor output shortfalls. The Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) of efficiency overcomes this shortcoming by taking both measurements mentioned above simultaneously. In this regard, the current study aims to employ the SBM in analyzing road safety performance. It is noteworthy that the efficiency of each Decision Making Unit (DMU) can be pessimistically measured using the slacks-based measure of inefficiency such that the anti-efficient DMUs provide the anti-efficient frontier. The results obtained from the optimistic and pessimistic frontiers are nonlinearly aggregated by means of the Evidential Reasoning (ER) algorithm. Furthermore, a Double-Frontier SBM-based Malmquist Productivity Index (DF-SBM-MPI) is provided to analyze the efficiency and technological changes in safety performance from 2014 to 2016. For this purpose, the standard SBM and Super-SBM models are used to compute the optimistic Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI); similarly, the pessimistic MPI is determined by means of the inverted SBM and Super-SBM models. Finally, the obtained MPIs from the two different points of view are geometrically combined to obtain the overall MPI.

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This paper is an endeavour to give an alternative definition for sustainable development (SD). It reviews the previous works in this area, and finds common grounds of these works, namely dynamism and quantification of the system. The paper then discusses dynamic stability and relates it to the concept of sustainability. It constructs an analogy between sustainability objectives and dynamic stability. The discussion continues to introduce chaos as one inherent characteristic of socio-economic systems because of their nonlinear behaviour. A new definition of SD is then proposed. It is applied to the dynamic models that describe the inter-relationships of environmental, economic and social variables. Finally, an example system has been employed to show the applicability of the definition. Policy-related parameters have been chosen to show the conditions in which the system is sustainable. This exercise shows that the presented method of identifying the conditions of sustainability could be usefully exploited in making decisions at macro levels. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.