Green Car Congress turns us on to the new Sustainable Mobility Project report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD): Mobility 2030. The final report from a two year research project, Mobility 2030 covers a broad range of transportation issues. The list of "indicators of sustainable mobility" give a small taste of what the full report covers: accessibility; financial outlay required of users; travel time; reliability; safety; security; greenhouse gas emissions; impact on the environment and on public well-being; resource use; equity implications; impact on public revenues and expenditures; prospective rate of return to private business. It's a pretty mainstream approach -- there's no talk about more radical solutions -- and appears to represent a mobility-focused iteration of what I've come to call the New Baseline. There's a lot of data here, and I'm still reading through it. As you might expect, the report is big: 180 pages, and a 5.7MB PDF download.
What you might not expect is the list of groups underwriting the report: BP, Daimler Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Hydro (a Norwegian energy company), Michelin, Nissan, Renault, Royal Dutch/Shell, Toyota, and VW. While that may trigger some additional skepticism about the report (especially given the final corporate conclusion, which is essentially "it's up to governments and the market to make us change"), in my initial skim-through the work looks detailed and solid. And if you don't like the analysis, the Sustainable Mobility Project has made the underlying data available for download. Both the model documentation (40KB PDF) and the Transport Spreadsheet Model (8.3 MB Excel) are available. As GCC describes them:
The IEA/SMP Transport Spreadsheet Model is designed to handle all transport modes and most vehicle types. It produces projections of vehicle stocks, travel, energy use and other indicators through 2050 for a reference case and for various policy cases and scenarios. It is designed to have some technology-oriented detail and to allow fairly detailed bottom-up modeling.
The report focuses on the year 2030, and the data is being used to construct a set of scenarios. A draft set (1.7MB PDF) is currently available, and the scenario authors -- GBN, as it turns out -- plan to have the final versions available in December.
As I indicated, I'm still reading through the Mobility 2030 document, so I'll try to have a more detailed report posted soon.