From National Transport Policies to Regional and Local Implementation—Incentive Schemes for Sustainable Mobility

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a Special Issue on incentive schemes for sustainable mobility for the journal Sustainability. The venue is a peer-reviewed open-access journal that publishes articles and communications in the interdisciplinary area of sustainability. For detailed information on the journal, we refer you to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability.

In order to achieve desired objectives as expressed in sustainable transport plans at regional and local level, financial and fiscal incentives administered from national to local levels could serve as important policy instruments. The Urban Environment Agreements in some Scandinavian countries are examples of such incentives. Other examples are performance-based incentive subsidy schemes for public transport, tax incentives for sustainable transport, local sustainable transport funds or co-financing of pilot and innovation projects in cities and regions, e.g., through Interreg or Civitas programs.

However, such incentives may produce unexpected results and inefficient spending. Sometimes, incentives are too weak to effectively steer towards desired outcomes. In other cases, strategic pricing could be more efficient than heavy investments. In order to achieve modal change from private car to active and public transport, the combination or even packaging of measures and policy instruments as seen as crucial in order to induce sustainable urban mobility. It is therefore imperative to be able to single out and better assess the impacts of national transport and land use policy instruments, before as well as after implementation, in order to adjust and fine-tune them according to the local context.

In this Special Issue, we are welcoming both theoretical contributions and empirical case studies that target issues of incentive schemes and policy instruments for sustainable transport development in cities and urban regions. How can they be understood, modeled or evaluated? Do we have evidence, showing that such policy instruments in fact may change travel behavior and mode choice in ways that could help to fulfil long-term sustainable development goals? If so, please share your experience and findings with us. We welcome systematic reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual papers, experimental studies, empirical cases, and surveys based on quantitative as well as qualitative approaches. If you are uncertain about whether your paper fits into the scope of this Special Issue, please contact the Guest Editors.

Examples of specific perspectives are:

• Impacts of co-funding programs
• Political economy aspects of co-funding
• Incentives for better public transport performance
• Public transport pricing policies
• Private cars: congestion charging, parking policies
• Schemes for behavioral change
• Incentives, social impacts, and inequalities
• Decision making and participation
• Models and tools for analyses and decision making

Assoc. Pro Anders Wretstrand
Dr. Helena Svensson
Dr. Jean Ryan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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