Sustainable Transport - Drivers, Change, Impacts, Policies.

The CIENS SIS on Sustainable Transportation has been divided into four work packages where TØI is responsible for three: CIENS SIS1 societal driving forces for sustainable transport; CIENS SIS3.1 about transport urban environment impacts and CIENS SIS4 about political processes for sustainable transport. (CIENS SIS2 (NINA) has expired). -CIENS-SIS3.2 was NILU's proportion of local communities and biofuels (Biebus project). The CIENS-SIS is consistently concerned with interdisciplinary theory and methodology development. A paper on "The Knowledge-Policy Interaction for Sustainable Transport - eased by Interdisciplinarity?" draws on CIENS experience and points on interdisciplinary potentials and paradoxes, and formed the basis for UrbaKnow project in the Environment 2015 program.: In CIENS SIS1 work has been devoted to data and methodology development, e.g. by coupling different data sets investigating drivers for sustainable transport (National travel survey, municipal registerdata).. Based on these data links is an integrated set of indicators for sustainable urban transport at municipal level developed. The article "The effects of sustainable transport policies on bicycling - A comparison of Norwegian cities examines, by use of a multilevel logistic regression analysis, what has influenced cycling over the past decade in 50 Norwegian municipalities. Despite considerable variation in the bicycle share in Norwegian cities, we find only a limited effect of policies for facilitating cycling when controlling for sociodemographic /-economic characteristics or geographical features. The article is immediately ready for submission. - Also Tønnesen PhD article on "Policy packages and state engagement: Comparing car-use reduction policy in two Norwegian cities" are partly funded from this SIS. In CIENS SIS3 (cooperation NIKU / TOI) is the article "Understanding the Geographies of Transport and Cultural Heritage: Comparing Two Urban Development Programs in Oslo." Believed in the journal Sustainability, 6/2014. The article finds positive synergies and win-win, between transport solutions and cultural attractions there too the business world is on track (as in the development of Bjørvika); whereas the local environment and social inclusion devoted far more attention than transport and culture where businesses are seldom involved (as in Groruddalen). -In CIENS SIS4 a new report on on "Norwegian Cycling Policy - on track" has recently been published (TØI-report 1453/2015), with a mainly historical policy-institutional perspective. Based on this work, a paper on "New forms of networks and narratives in the sustainable transport policy field - the case of Oslo cycling policy process", in cooperation with CICERO in progress. In CIENS common research strategy on urban sustainability increasingly more attention is payed to innovative methodological approaches for applied and policy relevant research, such as transdisciplinarity. Seven CIENS researchers participated (partly financed by this SIS and partly by network funds from the Environment 2015) in the International Transdisciplinarity Conference in Basel, in September, where we were in charge of one of the workshops, on Transdisciplinarity for Urban Sustainability. This initiative will be followed up here locally by an open CIENS workshop on transdisciplinary research on urban sustainability in the CIENS breakfast seminar series.

The environmental research institutes behind this proposal offer a unique interdisciplinary research competence in addressing the linkages between societal drivers, environmental change, impacts and policies in a common analytical framework, i.e. the enha nced causal chain for the relations between transport and environment. Sustainable transport is chosen as a common, and increasingly crucial, environmental research area. Transport produces the more persistent, and resistant, of the environmental problems . It also brings about a broad range of problems: both global and local emissions; health and ecological impacts; land take and landscape changes. Therefore, transport is often the source of substantial environmental policy goal conflicts. Focusing on the environmental trade-offs highlights the dilemmas of sustainable transport. It serves as a methodological crucial case, testing the thesis of sustainable transport under its most difficult conditions, when a solution has controversial effects. Overcoming these conflicts means handling difficulties in political, administrative and academic priorities and concerns, and pave the way for more robust solutions also under the more likely, more beneficial conditions. The proposed project will be executed through four main research tasks relating to various stages in the transport-environment chain, focusing on the not so well-known linkages between urban, landscape, and transport topics: 1) on social drivers behind mobility, 2) on environmental and landscape cha nges, 3) on significant urban impacts, and 4) on policy processes for sustainable transport. The methodological approaches include research reviewing, innovative case studies, and use of administrative and secondary (survey) data.