Sustainable development goals and transportation modes: Analyzing sustainability pillars of environment, health, and economy

Based on the scores and trends of Sustainable Development Goals, Iran, our case study, has been unsuccessful in nearly all the pillars of sustainable development despite the variations in socioeconomic variables related to the SDGs. This implies a comprehensive underdevelopment in Iran, necessitating the improvement of infrastructure which significantly affects all the pillars of sustainable development including environment, health, and economy. This study, takes transportation as an important infrastructure which has various direct and indirect impacts on all pillars of sustainable development, especially in the case study of Iran. To evaluate this, the present study aims to investigate 1) which sustainability perspective dominates in Iran (strong sustainability, weak sustainability, or health-centered sustainability); and 2) the consistency degree of each transportation mode with each pillar of sustainability including environment, health, and economy. We employ VAR and simultaneous equations system to find which perspective of sustainable development dominates Iran; and to rank the transportations modes in accordance with their consistency with sustainable development in Iran during 1979–2016. Overall, the results of this study is found to be significant and support the strong sustainability perspective in Iran. The most compliant transportation modes with the sustainable development in Iran are then ranked as: a) rail, b) air, c) road, and d) maritime transportation. These results suggest the policy-makers to: 1) value the environmental issues at the top of the agenda for the sustainability strategies; and 2) to shift the load of passenger and goods to the rail transportation by investing and developing the rail network.