The term “sustainable development” has been used for many years by environmentalists, politicians and government planners without any agreed definition. It is a term that has come to embrace concerns about the social as well as the physical environment.

These concerns range from the immediate and short term such as health, road safety and social exclusion to the very long term such as the security of energy supplies and climate change. In the absence of convergence on an agreed meaning for the term, “sustainable” has been used rather loosely as an adjective and applied to projects or policies which are judged to be less harmful than those they are replacing. Trends and policies which are unsustainable are easier to recognise than those which are sustainable.

In addition to concerns about atmospheric pollution in urban areas and climate change, there has been an emergence of a great number of other concerns in recent years to which the term has been applied. One of the major issues on the sustainability agenda is transport.

Motor vehicles consume one-third of the world’s oil output and contribute 14 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The continued growth of motorised transport appears to be unsustainable for three main reasons:

• degradation of the local and global environment;

• consumption of non-renewable resources which appear to be essential to the quality of life of future generations; and

• institutional failures which exacerbate the above-mentioned problems (for example, traffic congestion which increases pollution and fuel consumption but also generates a demand for infrastructure meaning further urbanisation of land and still more vehicle travel).

While technological innovation may help tackle certain environmental problems, the damage caused by the intrusion of infrastructure and vehicles into neighbourhoods and the countryside cannot be addressed so easily.

A definition of sustainable mobility was provided by the EU Transport Council in Towards a thematic strategy on the urban environment in April 2001. This communication identifies certain unsustainable trends. It recognises that traffic has significant impacts on the environment and health of urban citizens and the overall quality of life in towns. However, it also notes that rising congestion levels are hampering mobility and increasing the cost for the economy which is estimated to increase from 0.5 per cent of the Community GDP to one per cent by 2010.

This concern is an example of an unresolved tension commonly found in debates about sustainable transport which remained unresolved in the OECD’s Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST) project in 1999. The EST project also suggested an extensive list of social impacts of “hypermobility” ranging from social polarisation, road accidents to health and problems of policing. These impacts are rarely given due importance or even mentioned in most definitions of sustainable mobility. Such issues are also routinely ignored in EU discussions on sustainable transport. There is a great emphasis on the environment versus the economic benefits but very little is said about the social implications.

Today, although the sustainable mobility discourse is playing an increasingly important role in debates about transport, there is still little to show by way of achievement. The reluctance of public administrations to invest in sustainable mobility measures has tended to aggravate the situation with most politicians seeming to prefer environmental suicide to what they consider would be an act of political suicide if they were to attempt to implement such measures.

In addition to this, the relative strength of air and road lobbies vis-à-vis the much weaker representatives of public transport, walking and cycling, has contributed further to the difficulties of implementing “sustainable” mobility.

Many academics have criticised the term sustainability as a very flexible concept which can be used to justify many policies which in fact are not sustainable. And with respect to transport, traffic problems continue to worsen while the overall quality of the environment has continued to deteriorate. Governments, however, still promote road construction projects with the European Union’s main transport objective being to fund and improve the Trans-European Transport Network (with a substantial amount meant for removing bottlenecks on the main road network).

The trends of motorisation and increased motorised mobility in Malta mirror those of other developed countries.

However, Malta’s economic growth coupled with growth in transport demands, compared with that of pre-enlargement EU countries, has occurred at a faster rate and within a relatively very short time (see graph).

Should these trends continue, the basic access and development needs of current as well as future generations, referred to in the European Commission’s first objective in its definition of sustainable mobility, will be seriously compromised. With increased growth in car travel, the impacts of congestion and pollution will outweigh any benefits of private mobility while affecting economies through delays and lack of efficiency.

With regard to the second objective, the heavy investments on one user group (the motorist) will undermine the environmentally benign modes of travel, reduce modal choice and increase social polarisation.

The third objective of reducing energy consumption and emissions has implications which go beyond the shores of Malta itself. Malta is heavily reliant on fuel imports from other countries as well as imports of vehicles, since there is no vehicle manufacturing in Malta. However the most difficult problem Malta has to address, should it seek to meet its obligations as a signatory to the Kyoto protocol, is its dependence on tourism. It is currently seeking to promote more (up-market) tourism to stimulate the economy – an activity dependent on long-distance air travel. Worldwide, this is the fastest growing consumer of energy and producer of emissions. It also currently tops most lists of intractable environmental problems.

In terms of the impacts of tourism “on land”, energy consumption and use of private mobility are the major concerns. Luckily, most of Malta’s tourists (80 per cent) currently rely on public transport (mainly the bus services) and walking.

It is evident that there is a need for change in the manner in which transport policy is formulated and implemented, with the European Union having the potential, in principle, through the concept of subsidiarity to help local governments pursue such local priorities.

Maria Attard is a lecturer in Geography and Transport Policy at the University of Malta and a member of the National Commission for Sustainable Development