Sustainability Assessment Of Inland Transportation System Based On DEA Approach

Sustainable transport is regarded as transport capability that guarantees the mobility of individuals and goods in a way that advances the social and economic development of recent and future generations and limits negative environmental impact.Transport can help to cope with modern challenges,provided it receives global support to transform and reduce its negative externalities,which include traffic accidents affecting human life and health,air and noise pollution,wasted in-vehicle time,and climate change related to greenhouse gas emissions.However,at present,transport vehicles and infrastructure often develop in a way that poses considerable threats to sustainability.Therefore,the benefits of increased mobility must be weighed against the costs in the social,environmental,and economic dimensions.Implementing the principles of the sustainable development allows to achieve progress in multiple dimensions.Each of the dimensions can be defined in the measurable elements,the goals of a sustainable transportation system.To achieve environmental sustainability,the system needs to minimize consumption of resources,maximize land-use efficiency and restrain impact on ecological systems,including waste and pollution generation.To accomplish economic sustainability,the system is required to be efficient for movement of people and goods,facilitate economic development and do not contribute to economic vulnerability of society.To acquire social sustainability,the system meets access needs of all individuals,in a manner that is consistent with safety and human health,and promotes social interaction and equity.Moreover,sustainable transportation requires the development of sustainable transportation behaviors in all three of these dimensions.In order to provide a decision-makers with effective and complete conceptual framework to assess transportation comprehensively and holistically,there is a need for a framework which consist of all three dimensions of sustainable development and is a practical and useful tool of measuring performance in context of various transport modes.In the view of above,the purpose of this study has been defined as an establishment of conceptual framework for transportation system considering triple bottom line of sustainability quantitatively.Beside the fact that this thesis presents three-dimensional concept of sustainable development,it specially covers unexplored yet social sustainability of transportation system.The current evaluation research on sustainable transportation concentrate mainly on environmental and economic aspects,leaving behind the social dimension of sustainability.The discussion on the data envelopment analysis(DEA)transport assessment,calls for the continuity to enclose the impacts of transportation on society.The inclusion of social sustainability,social performance or social impacts,as well as the interrelationship between the environment and society,are predominantly neglected in the previous transport-related literature,and therefore addressed in this thesis.Proposing the overall sustainability assessment,with economic and environmental factors,the thesis especially focuses closer on the benefits and impacts of transport operations on society from the conceptual and empirical points of view.This thesis built on the methodology of DEA and a comprehensive analysis of social,economic and environmental factors proposes a triple bottom line-based measurement framework which can assist policy makers in better understanding of regional transportation system.The proposal of triple bottom line-based framework was proceeded by in-depth social sustainability considerations.The insightful study of social indicators which were reviewed in literature and used to propose a separated assessment framework,contributed to a better understanding of social dimension of sustainability.The social factors which were considered essential for social sustainability assessment and which did not overlap with other dimensions of sustainability,were incorporated in the triple bottom line-based framework.The assessment of the social sustainability of transportation identifies the measurable key social indicators and further propose an evaluation framework for relative performance analysis of social sustainability.This work is the first attempt to assess regional social sustainability of transport explicitly by means of a multi-output performance measure.Shannon’s entropy is used to combine the results of selected data envelopment analysis(DEA)models,which meet the requirement of weak disposability of undesirable output,into a unified social sustainability performance score.The method is applied for the regional road transport in the European Union(EU)member states for the period 2004-2017.The empirical results are compared among countries individually,grouped into two clusters of old(EU-15)and new(EU-13)EU members,and examined over time.The analysis suggests that considering only social factors in the measurement of social sustainability eliminates the bias which arises from the inclusion of economic factors.As a result,our method prevents giving the benefit of the doubt to more economically advanced countries,which is clearly seen in the findings.The conducted study also confirms the capacity of the proposed DEA-based framework to serve as an adequate tool for measuring the social sustainability of transport,which may support policy-makers in the operative benchmark employing social factors.Built upon the analysis regarding social dimension of sustainability and literature review on economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability this thesis further addresses the transport sustainability in multiple dimensions,by developing a triple bottom line-based sustainability assessment framework.The proposed network data envelopment analysis(DEA)measure organizes the three components of the system into a parallel structure,allocates shared input across subsystems,and incorporates undesirable output.The proposed novel triple bottom line-based network DEA model is an extension to the black-box inefficiency model and does not require a weak or strong disposability assumption and hence identifies non-dominated benchmark targets for a DMU under evaluation.The model allows a decision-making unit(DMU)to self-select a direction toward the efficiency frontier that maximizes its potential.The model also does not let the DMU achieve efficiency by increasing its undesirable output or acquire a lower efficiency score by decreasing the undesirable output,because the model is monotonic in unintended output.The network model organizes components into a parallel structure,providing a unified framework able to measure overall inefficiency and assess the performance of individual component processes simultaneously,while additionally allocating shared inputs across sub-units of the system.The empirical application of the triple bottom line-based network DEA model determines the efficiency of regional inland transportation systems in China from 2006 to 2015.The results indicate a rise in overall transport efficiency between China’s 11th and 12th five-year development plan periods and link the economic growth with a decrease in environmental transport efficiency in the Central and Western zones and with a decline in social efficiency in the Eastern zone.Since 2012,the social sustainability remains the weakest component of inland transport,which requires special attention by policy-makers to support vulnerable groups of transport users.This study provides further insight into the investigated measures of sustainable transport and proposes policy recommendations for the improvement of inland transport in China.