This paper addresses the problems of making sustainable transport policy: how is transport policy created in, for example, a place like Calgary to meet the broad, long-term goals of sustainability. The paper argues that: sustainability is not a single goal but a complex mix of objectives some of which conflict with one another; which objectives are the most urgent, which the most important and which the most effective must be decided by either conscious decision or unconscious assumption; these rankings will be different from place to place and from time to time: sustainability is bound to mean different things to different people; with a stable set of compatible objectives there are always a myriad of mixtures are always a myriad of mixtures of possible policies but with a range of shifting, competitive objectives those possibilities become densely complex; decision makers must have a technique to forecast and appraise policy outcomes; for transport policy such a technique must have three major attributes: (1) it must be able to adapt to local weightings of the component attributes within sustainability; (2) it must be dynamic, not forecasting a specified future design date but iterating through time to produce a time series; and (3) it must forecast land use; finally, without viable assessment techniques, sustainability will remain a concept to which little regard is paid but which will be unrelated to operational decisions. (A)
Abstract