Assessing the Ecological Footprint of an Urban Transportation System

Abstract

The ecological footprint methodology is here applied to the urban transport system of the Italian town of Palermo (Sicily). By only using the current running fleet, a synthetic indicator represented by the "equivalent bio-productive" land, corresponding to the actual transport configuration, will be built up. This indicator can be usefully adopted for ranking various options in the urban context referring, for example, to different arrangements of the transportation demand between private and public means. This could allow local administrations to environmentally hierarchizing alternative plans concerning the urban transportation