The Green

Sustainable Transport = "also commonly referred to as sustainable transportation or sustainable mobility [and] has no widely accepted definition.

"The concept of sustainable transport is a reaction to some of the things that have gone radically and visibly wrong with transportation policy, practice and performance over the last half of the twentieth century in particular (unsustainable resource take, energy profligacy, pollution, declining service levels despite increasing investments, poor service for specific social and economic groups). Over most of the century, it was assumed that adequate transportation structures needed to be built since they provide an essential underpinning to growth and economic health. Accordingly the main concern of transport planners and policy makers was in the "supply" of transportation, and specifically in ensuring that the supporting infrastructure was going to be adequate to support all projected requirements. The dominant approach was, therefore, to forecast and then build to meet.

"The sustainable transport movement, which has gradually gained in force over the last decade and a half, has in the process started to shift the emphasis in public spending and actions away from building and supply, to management and demand. In all cases the values of heightened respect of the environment and prudent use of natural resources are central, with varying degrees of urgency expressed by different actors and interests. That said, it is still very much a minority movement and most actual expenditures in the sector are determined by criteria other than sustainability. What remains clear is that sustainable transportation mainly refers to human behavior, not to technology. In that sense, a behavioral approach considers not only a set of non-polluting and human scaled travel behaviors, regardless of the means and technology used, but also a set of reinforcers both individual and social to promote that sort of behaviors.

"Colloquially, sustainable transport is used to describe all forms of transport which minimize emissions of carbon dioxide and pollutants. It can refer to public transport, car sharing, walking and cycling as well as technology such as electric and hybrid cars and biodiesel."
(Wikipedia) [en.wikipedia.org]

In Word on the Street: Can Car-Sharing Make a Difference? [www.sundancechannel.com], Colin Dunn, author of sundancechannel.com's Treehugger Blog, concludes that "as more people move back into cities and technology continues to improve, personal transportation will become more of a service commodity than a matter of ownership."
More... [www.sundancechannel.com]