Transportation Sustainability Framework

Abstract

Previous research highlighted that the necessary indicators of effectiveness for sustainability are not being measured by the respective stakeholders in Trinidad and Tobago. As with other small island developing states, the country cannot effectively determine its progress towards or away from sustainability. The authors have developed an impact-based hierarchal framework comprising the triple bottom lineeconomy, environment, and societyand applied it to the local transportation system. Bearing in mind the confines of limited resources and data availability for the Trinidad and Tobago case, the selected indicators were aligned with those used by national, regional and international bodies to monitor sustainability progress, making the framework more useful to stakeholders. Three requirements, nine criteria and 22 indicators were incorporated into the transportation sustainability framework. The authors propose that integrating the necessary data collection and monitoring processes with established tasks already under the purview of the various line ministries can reduce the overall costs of evaluating sustainability progress. Local transportation engineering professionals were surveyed to establish a relative weighting for the key sustainability requirements. They were of the view that the social, environmental and economic sustainability requirements should be weighted at 50%, 33.3% and 16.7% respectively. The professionals also saw potential applications like determining the overall status of and setting targets for improvement to the transportation system, assessing the suitability of proposed alternatives and making decisions about investments in the transport sector. The analytical hierarchy process structure employed in the development of the framework also permits the user to apply their preferred multi-criteria decision making technique based on the alternatives arising and the tolerable degree of compromise.