Relationship Between Human Capital and Transportation Sustainability for the United States and Selected European Countries

There is a growing interest in developing reliable and meaningful composite indexes of transportation sustainability. Several such indexes have been developed, but none have been used for comparing countries. This paper introduces a cost-oriented national transportation sustainability index (NTSI) and uses it to compare the performance of the United States with 27 selected European countries for the years 2005 and 2011. A series of panel data models is then used to investigate the relationship between human capital, macroeconomic and social factors, and transportation sustainability. The results showed that Switzerland was the best performing country on the NTSI in 2005 but was displaced at the top by the United Kingdom in 2011. Other countries that performed quite well were the Nordic countries and some of the older member-nations of the European Union (EU). The United States was by far the worst performing country in terms of transportation sustainability in 2005 and 2011. One interesting finding was the split in the performance of the non–Nordic European Union countries. In general, the newer EU member nations had by far the best performance on the environmental subindex of the NTSI in 2005. But by 2011 this advantage had almost entirely eroded. The numbers suggest that this was caused by a rapid rate of increase in motorization in these countries that was not necessarily paralleled by corresponding changes in their economic performance. Overall, it was found that factors associated with a high level of human capital (such as high health index, high educational attainment, and low poverty level) were also associated with high levels of transportation sustainability. Conversely, high levels of motorization were associated with lower levels of transportation sustainability.