Page 268 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

Environmental Sustainability and Cycling as a
Transport Mode: Best Practices

with it, air pollution in cities. This situation leads to the usage of inefficient
public spaces dominated by private car use with low capacity and low
occupancy rate. In addition, as a result of adopting the traditional approach,
a significant part of public open spaces cause multi-storey intersections, new
parking areas, urban spaces that do not put people at the center, where roads
are widened with narrowed sidewalks, street structure that creates obstacles
to accessibility for pedestrians and negatively affects urban aesthetics. In
traditional transportation policies, the policy maker ignores the demand for
travel and the resulting traffic demand (Öcalır, 2020).
The damage of an urban transportation system focused on automobile
dependence, especially to the environment, climate and nature, negatively
affects human health and quality of life. It is clear that automobile use and
its preservation as a dependency have negative consequences on the three
stages of sustainability: economy, society and, in particular, environmental
quality. Therefore, it is becoming clear that we can no longer sustain vehicle
dependence for urban transport all over the world. In short, a mobility-
based urban transportation model with a private vehicle is unsustainable. For
example, air pollution is one of the most prominent effects on environmental
sustainability caused by traffic on roads. Emissions from road vehicles contain
significant levels of polluting particles that cause health effects and pollution.
The most remarkable one among the causes of climate change, the effects
of which are obvious today, is the gases that emerge as a result of burning of
fossil fuels causing carbon emissions. Another problem field is the effects of
acidification on nature, agriculture and landscape, in short, on environmental
sustainability (Wee, 2007).
Newman and Kenworthy (2000) reveal the negative effects of the private
vehicle-dependent urban transportation system on the sub-issues of
sustainability, that is, the environment, economy and society, in Table 1.
From the point of view of environmental sustainability, which is the main
subject of the research, the emerging main problem fields include fossil fuel
dependence from petroleum, increase of emissions that are the source of
carbon emissions, uncontrolled urban expansion, a decrease in groundwater
reserves due to problems in stormwater drainage and the resulting flood risks
and deficiencies in traffic management, congestion and noise pollution. Along
with the environmentally unsustainable structure, the economic costs and
socially unsustainable consequences created by private vehicle dependency
show that it is inevitable to turn to alternative types of transportation and
shape the structure of new urban mobility policies with these alternative
active types of transportation. As indicated in Table 1 below, private vehicle-
oriented urban and regional transportation systems have quite significant
environmental effects in addition to their economic and social effects.

Year 2 / Issue 3 / January 2023 253