Current trends in transport indicate that the system is moving away from sustainability and that major changes are necessary to make the transport system more compatible with environmental sustainability. Main problems may occur in urban transport, where not many promising solutions are expected, while the problems are severe. In view of the great number of uncertainties, the authors will in their paper resort to scenarios. In the paper expert scenarios, which lead to a sustainable transport system are constructed by applying the recently developed `Spider model'. Based on a set of distinct characteristics, leading to eight axes in the spatial, institutional, economic and social-psychological field, an evaluation framework is constructed, which visualizes the driving forces that largely influence the future of the transport system. Next, expected and desired scenarios are constructed by means of opinions of Dutch transport experts - both average scenarios and scenarios of segments of the respondents -, which have been investigated by means of a survey. The expected scenarios indicate that many current trends will continue, while the transport system is largely the same as the current one. The desired scenarios on the other hand, suggest the emergency and the need for a more collective system, in which also many new modes are operating. The resulting urban transport systems are also discussed. By calculating the CO2 emissions in the average expected and desired scenario, it appears that the expected scenario does not lead to a large scale reduction of those emissions; the desired scenario however, may lead to a large scale reduction of the emissions. The conclusion is that the differences in expert opinion are small and that the road towards a sustainable (urban) transport system is still far away, although the compact city concept may perhaps offer some solution.
Abstract