The relevance of causal chains for planning and evaluating sustainable transport policies

Policy planners often lack guidance in their approach to meet sustainability goals in transportation. Considering the multiplicity of actors involved and challenges to be met, as well as the intertwined impacts of transportation, a more widespread use of causal chain analysis seems relevant to improve the decision-making process. This paper illustrates the usefulness of the causal chain approach for 1) transport-related policy integration, 2) for visualizing, comparing and choosing the most promising strategies aiming at achieving sustainable transportation goals, and 3) for identifying and selecting the best performance indicators to be used for monitoring and evaluation purpose.