What is sustainable transport?

In terms of transportation, sustainability implies that “corporations, governments, [and individuals] seek the simultaneous achievement of three fundamental goals: economic profitability, social responsibility, and environmental conservation” (Low & Gleeson 1). In other words, for any mode or system of transport to be sustainable, it should be: a. economically viable and beneficial for both producers and consumers, b. socially equitable - considerate of interests and concerns of all social layers, and c. environmentally compatible, causing the least degree of damage and counting in the cost of environmental remedies, clean ups, and repairs.

Renewable energy, for instance, such as the energy harvested from solar and wind power, is most sustainable because it is cheaper to produce and distribute, and the process of harvesting this power is considerably cleaner and harmless to the environment. Moreover, it can be easily accessed by a larger section of the population compared to the number of people who has the control of and access to fossil fuels.

The production and use of fossil fuels, especially oil, on the other hand, represent an example of the least sustainable energy sources. We have already consumed half of the world's oil reserves (Newman & Kenworthy 2). There are, according to some studies, roughly about 1,000 billion barrels of oil left to be dug out, 90% of which has already been found and it is becoming increasingly more costly to produce oil because the easily accessible oil reserves are already being depleted (Newman & Kenworthy 49). The production of oil will be at its peak by 2010 and will be declining from then on (Gilham 107). This, of course, will have direct consequences on the price of oil and the global economy, which has been made so dependent on oil. Besides the economic aspect, oil is not sustainable from environmental and social perspectives, either.

Unfortunately, since especially 1950s, oil and automotive industries have pushed the entire planet towards a motor-vehicle oriented transportation mode. For them every individual was a potential client for their products. As huge corporations in the market, a simple logic governed their business principles: the more individuals bought and used motor-vehicles, the more cars, car parts, and oil they would sell. They have been grossly successful at this so far.

In fact, their success in this business has reached such levels that, with their unprecedented world-wide economic and political powers, they have been able to silence, drown, buy out, repress, or eliminate all together any opposition or alternative that emerged in their way. In most parts of the world, they have achieved to create an atmosphere where car-culture is the cultural norm for mobility. For many, owning and using a car is a necessity, a sign of success, a great source of fun, and an important way to belong to the society all at the same time.

How has the automobile reached this status? Was it an inevitable phase in the civilization's history, like destiny? Was there no other way but this to happen?

History always carries the risk of being retold as if it is a single-pathed occurrence; as if all happenings followed each other on a single track because that was the only logical, natural, practical, beneficial, and permissible track. This happens when the contradicting forces involved at a given historic event are not portrayed accurately. Instead, the event is put on a single and straight line, identifying and highlighting only one, the winning force in the contradiction.

This view of history tends to give us only one version of the story. It imposes on us the version of the winner (leaving out the discussion, for the moment, on how the winner became the winner). This version tells the story as pre-destined series of events: as if everything happened because it was their fate to happen, there was no possibility of another reality, there were no alternatives to the path that brought us today’s reality.

With this perspective, today’s masses, much like the masses of 1950s, are encouraged to think, for example, that indeed “what’s good for the GM is good for the country” or that the US was pre-destined to go through such suburbanization and fully assumed car culture as we have witnessed so far.

As it happened, however, that the US suburbanization and the establishment of car culture during 1950s had its own contradicting forces and that one of the forces (that of the oil and automotive industries) happened to overpower the other ones, putting forth and realizing only one out of all the other possible realities that we could have had. There were other visions, designs, modes, and plans, put forth by other forces than that era’s dominating oil and automotive econo-political powers.

In other words, history is not pre-determined by some supernatural forces. It takes a shape and sets itself in a course by the outcomes of struggles among opposing forces in the society and nature. The force that manages to overpower its challengers determines the course of history to the extent of its capabilities.

The emergence, rise, and establishment of suburbanization and car culture took its place in the history with the same principle: forces who wanted it to happen overpowered those who opposed it. Were the opposing forces more powerful than the pro-suburbanization and car culture forces, the American people would have found different alternatives for their lives and future.

Since certain aspects of our reality today (the dominating presence of suburbs and car culture) were determined by the contradictions of yesterday, the same struggle continues today among the same actors: the struggle between public versus private transportation, railways and bikeways versus highways, pedestrians and cyclers versus cars, spatially compact high and moderate density cities and towns with centers versus spatially spread-out low-density center-less suburbs.

The outcome of this struggle determines:

  1. The way in which natural and human resources are consumed;
  2. The way the human ecology looks and thus the way human beings feel in it;
  3. The rate and dimensions of human impact on the environment; and
  4. Some of the major columns upon which our social/political/economical structure is built.

We are constantly making choices among different possibilities for our next moment’s reality. What is to come is born out of what we see and accept now. In this regard, it is our utmost human responsibility to give a chance to redesigning the human ecology (our cities, towns, neighborhoods, villages, anywhere we live) according to the principles of sustainability (as opposed to the interests of certain corporate entities) and to assuming a life style that matches those principles.

The enthusiastic championing of alternative transportation modes (trains, trolleys, subways, bicycles, and walking), in a sense, is based on the belief that suburbanization and car culture (anywhere in the world as performed so far) is traumatic and pathological for the humanity’s experience of existing on this planet and for all the life forms that this planet bares, for it is a continuation of anthropocentric philosophy and practice.

In modern times, extensively speaking since the industrial revolution, the human expansion and actions are more intensely and devastatingly damaging to the planet because, in addition to the human-scale impact, now we also have ‘machine-scale impacts.’ The more developed the technology gets, the greater its impacts become, for positive or negative. Based upon the anthropocentric universe-view, the planet with everything on it is put in the service of single-sided demands of human population and the technology is used to further facilitate this destructive setting.


Back to the main Bike Library Concept Exploration page.