Sustainability Assessment Indicators in Land Transportation

Abstract

Transportation is vital to life in society; it enables economic, social, and environmental development through connections between areas, cities, and countries, facilitating interactions and integrations. However, transportation is one of the sectors that most impacts sustainability, causing, among other things, emissions of gases, noise, and accidents. Through an integrative bibliographic framework, this study aims to assess the indicators used to evaluate the sustainability of land transportation in various contexts. To this end, relevant papers were selected with intuition to present their main characteristics, and through correlations between the variables analyzed, a framework was built indicating the current situation and future perspectives of the study. In terms of results, some common points were identified among papers, and some categories were pointed out as priorities for a future research agenda, such as the lack of standardization of indicators regarding metrics and nomenclature to emphasize sustainability. A lack of studies covering sustainability as a whole was found, which limits the results of sustainability assessments by only focusing on classic indicators and their deficiencies in relation to social inclusion, political–legal issues, and civil and human rights, as well as the standardization of indicators in other specific sectors.