PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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rethinking of transport systems, let alone of land use sustainability. 12 Yet most
mainstream transport experts now at least verbally admit that there are “environmental
limits to motorization.” There is also a growing recognition that the transport sector, and
motorists in particular, impose costs on both society and nature that are not accounted for
in present transport pricing mechanisms. In the last few years, a multitude of transportsector
“social cost” or “externality” studies have been conducted for the US and Europe
(see e.g. Greene, Jones et al. 1997; Hohnmeyer, Ottinger et al. 1997; Weinreich 1998;
INFRAS/IWW 2000). Free parking has been identified as a major hidden subsidy to
drivers in the US (Shoup 1997). Pressure on national governments for “getting the prices
right” (T&E 1995) and for a more consistent application of the “polluter pays” principle
is rising.
At the same time, the macro-oriented debates over oil depletion, finite resources
and the earth’s limited carrying capacities based on Malthusian insights of “Limits to
Growth” (Meadows, Randers et al. 1972), or more recently, on the ideas of
environmental economists like Daley or Constanza only inspired rather capital-intensive,
innovation- and technology-based transport solutions which would fall in the “ecomanagerialism”
category (Luke 1999). 13
One striking example of this is that the
international community’s main climate-change-combating financial instrument, the UN-
12 For a particularly vehement argument that “the road transport system is almost always more efficient for
the user than its competitors,” see Gerondeau (1997:pxxxvi). For a typical publication advocating electric
vehicle use, try Sperling (1995). For a rather comprehensive and up-to-date overview of road and
congestion pricing issues, pick up the edited volume by Button and Verhoef (1998).
13 In the recent report “Toward a Sustainable Future” (TRB 1997:253ff) by the TRB Committee for the
Study on Transportation and a Sustainable Environment in the US, STTP co-founder David Burwell issued
a very interesting dissenting statement in the back of the report, carefully exposing the narrow, biological
approach of this scientific committee. He clarifies that an analysis of environmental threats is not the same
as a sustainability analysis, which would necessarily take a broader, systems view and include social
measures of performance.