Page 270 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

Environmental Sustainability and Cycling as a
Transport Mode: Best Practices

• Greenhouse gases: Initiatives to reduce carbon-related emissions lead
policy makers to reduce transport-related emissions in order to create
significant changes. This is due to the fact that the fastest growing fossil
fuel user is the transportation sector.
• Air quality: The cleanliness quality of the air is essential for urban
health, but automobile-oriented urbanization creates an environment
that regularly exceeds air pollution limits. Since the transition to motor
vehicles that do not produce emissions will not provide a decrease in
traffic volume, the need to adopt alternative types of transportation is
inevitable.
• Urban expansion effects: Settlements expanding towards the peripheral
areas, have a high amount of asphalt or road infrastructure for
automobile-oriented transportation. This bring along more rainwater-
oriented problems.
• Traffic Effects: Due to car dependency, problems emerge such as noise
and visual pollution, traffic accidents and parking problems along with
the excessive traffic.

The significant impact of the transportation sector, and especially urban
transportation, is quite clearly seen on the challenges experienced in
environmental sustainability and climate change issues. According to Babalık
(2019), unsustainable urban transportation also bring about the problems to be
solved in a local level, such as, inefficient use of natural resources, emergence
of urban mobility systems where social justice is not taken into account, policies
that are far from solving the climate change and energy crisis, extended
travel times in urban journeys, inefficient infrastructure use, reduced quality
of space and life. However, the sustainable goals that should be included
in modern transportation planning and policies, aim to eliminate the use of
energy and resources in transportation, transport-derived emissions, inequality
in accessibility, traffic congestion and the related time-wasting problems,
inefficient infrastructure and public space usage (Babalık, 2019).
The solution for these environmentally unsustainable effects will only be
possible with the changes in urban systems by ensuring less vehicle dependent
housing and employment arrangements, traffic calming designs and policy
instruments, building new public transport networks and giving priority to
non-motorized transport types as cycling and walking that are integrated
with these networks. In this context, it becomes important to understand why
cycling is one of the most suitable types of sustainable urban mobility.

Year 2 / Issue 3 / January 2023 255