An empirical assessment on the transportation sustainability indicators and their impact on economic productivity

Abstract

Sustainable transportation has been traditionally acknowledged as an accelerating factor in achieving economic productivity. This paper attempts to frame a methodology to study the sustainability of the transportation sector and economy, based on selected key transportation sustainability performance indicators. Previous findings in the literature support the contribution of transportation performance indicators towards achieving economic productivity. This paper examines the dependency of key transportation sustainability indicators on United States economic productivity. The econometric model consisted of performance indicators: a portion of the budget devoted to transportation, per capita traffic congestion delay and, efficient pricing for transportation as the independent variable with per capita GDP as the dependent variable. Three hypotheses were validated using multiple linear regression analysis, with statistical software Minitab 17 and visualized using Tableau http://dx.doi.org/10.0.9. A predictive and what-if analysis was also conducted. The results show a strong correlation between the indicators chosen, highlighting their role in contributing towards overall sustainability.