A Study On Urban Transport Sustainability Based On Ecological Footprint Theory

Since the publication of "Our common future" in1987, the concept of sustainable development has become generally accepted by the new ideas in countries around the world. However, in recent years, with China’s rapid economic development, vehicle ownership is increasing year by year, the contradiction between the development of transportation of China’s major cities and limited urban traffic bearing capacity becomes increasingly obvious. The traffic environment pollution, traffic block has become quite serious. This series of problems have also become a bottleneck of restricting our economic development and improvement of people’s living standard. Therefore, effective measurement to the sustainable development level of the transport has important strategic and practical significance.Since the concept of sustainable development have been proposed, scholars from various countries has put forward same valuable evaluation method, ecological footprint analysis is one of those. This paper mainly uses the ecological footprint analysis method for dynamic analysis of Tianjin2006-2010traffic ecological footprint trends, and so we can do a quantitative evaluation to the sustainable development of Tianjin traffic. On this basis, the paper proposes the suggestions of the sustainable development of Tianjin traffic.Through this paper analysis, we can conclude:the Tianjin’s transportation in2006-2010has been in a state of ecological deficit and this state show a downward trend. This suggests that in recent years, the development of Tianjin traffic is by the constraints of the supply of traffic ecological carrying capacity, in the state of unsustainable development. From the aspect of the structure of the ecological footprint, in recent years, the ecological footprint of private cars has been accounted for more than50%of the total transportation ecological footprint, and has the largest influence in transportation ecological footprint; followed by a taxi; while the ecological footprint of the subway and light rail is relatively small, only accounts for4%and3%of the total transportation ecological footprint. From the structure of the land types of ecological footprint, in recent years, the indirect land of energy area in a majority, accounting for more than95%of the total transportation ecological footprint; the area of direct land occupy only part of the few, accounted for only about5%of the total transportation ecological footprint. So, the suggestions for traffic sustainable development of Tianjin are mainly:On the one hand, we need to improve the level of the supply of transportation ecological footprint; On the other hand, we should take powerful measures to strictly control the needs of the private car transportation ecological footprint. Lastly, we should improve energy efficiency, and encourage people to use environmentally-friendly energy. As for the government, through the effective policy tool from the above two aspects, traffic, environmental protection, automobile, planning and other departments to coordinate research, is a must road to realize the traffic sustainable development of Tianjin.