Berkeley Planning Journal

Almost 20 years after the term “sustainable development” was popularized in the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), the U.S. government turned its attention towards application of the concept of sustainability to transport planning. In response to a 2003 request by the Secretary of Transportation, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Research Council established a committee to consider how sustainability could be integrated into transport planning, chiefly through holding a conference on the topic. The committee’s report concluded that “a goal of transportation planning should be to address transportation’s unsustainable impacts including depletion of nonrenewable fuels, climate change, air pollution, fatalities and injuries, congestion, noise pollution, low mobility, biological damage, and lack of equity”.