Sustainable Transportation Planning, A New Academic Specialization in the USA

Recent efforts have helped to augment the knowledge base, the public policies, professional practices and funding required for sustainable transportation. I argue that the progress made is laudable but caution that it may vanish rapidly if, due to a number of factors and events, including the need to ameliorate the consequences of the global financial crisis, attention is redirected at resuming a nation building project centred on land development and automobility. This paper uses a fourfold-criterion to analyse the new specialization in non-motorized transportation planning and to discuss the dilemma of technology transfer among communities and countries.