Green Economy: Opportunities for Reshaping Personal Transportation? Between Tough Technological Choices and Induced Client Behavior

One of today’s pressing problems is how to take environmentally responsible action within the transportation sector, especially when faced with difficult alternatives, that is, choices between alternatives which are by nature multicriterial. This leads to problems with objectives which resemble those of strategic games and to a lesser extend those of uncertainty-facing technical decisions. In the medium to long run, such choices also lead to binding consequences and sometimes to undesirable outcomes. By now public opinion – at least in developed economies – seems to prefer environmental intervention over inactivity. While there is overwhelming awareness and evidence of the environmental harm caused by our lifestyle in an industrialized and overpopulated world, there is much less consensus over what mitigating actions should be taken. In order to highlight both the difficulty and the risk associated which such action, we portrait the situation from a country (Romania) which does not enjoy much reassurance concerning the longer-term viability of implementing far-reaching environmental reforms: The lack of any noteworthy societal tradition in favor of determined environmental action combined with the absence of “patient” capital may undermine progress. Simultaneously, there is widespread hope of gaining a much higher living standard by more aggressive, quantitative economic growth. This situation may be typical for most emerging economies, that is, for the bigger part of the world population. We propose to represent the choice along two main dimensions, namely, (a) choice of vehicle propulsion type and (b) ownership structure of the means of transportation. The factors contributing to narrowing down the choices may be subdivided into (1) embodied technical advances and fleet age, (2) costs raised by different degrees of closing of resource cycles, (3) aspects of relieving traffic congestions and reducing delays, and (4) re-planning and re-purposing use of urban space. Possible follow-up effects and the chances of eventual implementation are discussed.