Strategic Environmental Assessment Of The Transport Sector

This report contributes to the development of effective procedures for incorporating adequate environmental assessments in all strategic transport sector decisions.

This report examines recent experience in developing environmental assessment internationally and makes recommendations on maximising the effectiveness of this new tool.

This report makes recommendations for good practice bringing the results of economic appraisals and environmental assessments before decision makers in the transport sector on the basis of reviews of recent experience in infrastructure planning and policy development in seven countries.

Assessing the full scale of environmental impacts is essential for effective planning of transport and land use. This is an analysis of transport and land-use planning using strategic environmental assessment (SEA). It establishes the effectiveness of SEA through comparative studies of practice in three countries: Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. The author shows that use of SEA is widespread but far from systematic. He demonstrates the advantages of adopting a systematic application of a comprehensive form of SEA derived from all the major current approaches. Only once this approach is fully understood and systematically applied will all the full benefits be achieved and environmental impacts be minimalized.

This title was first published in 2003. The European Union is constantly struggling to find effective ways to plan major transport infrastructure developments at a European level. This is a critical factor in the emerging debates surrounding the absorption of the accession states into the EU, but it is essential for these states that their economic competitiveness is supported by appropriate and effective transport infrastructure. It is therefore crucial to find innovative approaches to the infrastructure itself, how it is financed and the ways in which proper evaluation procedures are implemented to select which policies, programmes and projects should be supported. This informative volume brings together leading international specialists in economic evaluation applied within the transport sector. Their contributions encompass all the main levels at which transport planning is typically conceptualized - strategic/regional policy, programme and project planning. It therefore examines how coherent economic evaluation practice can be developed and applied not only across different physical scales, but also across national borders.

- Substantial progress has been made in improving the sustainability of transport in Europe in a number of areas and is reported in this paper. Nevertheless there remain important problems and challenges: - unsustainable rates of traffic growth ...