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The lens of sustainability refocuses the perception of transportation and allows a look beyond its accustomed role of providing vehicular mobility to the broader impacts of transportation on the environment, society, and the economy. As the understanding of transportation's function evolves beyond throughput and capacity, sustainability can be used as an organizing principle for transportation planning to promote livable communities. To fully understand and integrate the ideas of sustainability with transportation, the proper metrics and performance measures need to be developed and adopted. This study demonstrated how the theoretical concepts and definitions of transportation sustainability could be transformed into a practical metric for assessing the performance of the U.S. transportation system in terms of sustainability. The study focused on characterizing and measuring the economic aspect of sustainability in relation to transportation. The analysis was carried out for surface transportation at the statewide level and took into consideration the degree of urbanization of states. The final results described the relationship between urbanity, mode share, and the economic aspects of transportation sustainability. On the basis of this assessment, the best-performing states in terms of the economic aspects of transportation sustainability were more urban and had lower automobile mode shares.

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Previous surveys of people's attitudes toward automated vehicles (AVs) and transit integration primarily took place in large urban areas. AV-transit integration also has a great potential in small urban areas. A survey of people's attitudes towards AV-transit integration was carried out in two small urban areas in Wisconsin, United States. A total of 266 finished responses were analyzed using text mining, factor analysis, and regression analysis. Results showed that respondents knew about AVs and driving assistance technologies. Respondents welcome AV-transit integration but were unsure about its potential impacts. Technology-savvy respondents were more positive but had more concerns about AV-transit integration than others. Respondents who enjoyed driving were not necessarily against transit, as they were more positive about AV-transit integration and were more willing to use automated buses than those who did not enjoy driving as much. Transit users were more positive toward AV-transit integration than non-transit users.