MANAGING TRANSPORT DEMAND IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. IN: MAKING URBAN TRANSPORT SUSTAINABLE

It is gaining acceptance that growth in demand for transport must be decoupled from economic growth. The future trend of transport policy should be toward reducing the rate at which vehicle- and ton-miles of freight transport grow, and reducing these in an absolute way. This can be achieved without sacrificing the prospect of economic growth. Indeed, many transport experts in Europe argue that EU countries can only continue to grow their economies if traffic congestion and pollution problems are solved first. This European tendency echoes changes in U.K. national transport policy which, in spite of some residual support for large, expensive new roads, is still oriented in the direction of demand management and reducing the need to travel. This amounts to a fundamental shift in policy more demanding culturally and psychologically than in any technical sense. But the view of many politicians and engineers is that only roads can bring relief from congestion and deliver economic gains for hard pressed regions. With these items in mind, this chapter reviews the power of demand management solutions to solve both sets of problems.