Sustainable Transport: A Comparison of Ecological Footprint and Travel Patterns in Three Cities in Vietnam, New Zealand and Finland

There have been many debates on how to reduce the environmental impacts of travelling. Common suggestions are: increasing urban density, reducing travel distance to walkable and cyclable distances, using more public transport and so on. However, there is growing evidence which reveals that it is still unclear how urban form and density can be associated with travel distance. Hence, this article explores what forms the largest part of individual transport footprint in terms of domestic travel and the reasons why. Using ecological footprint measurement, this article will examine the environmental impact of domestic travel in three different cities: Hanoi in tropical Vietnam, Wellington in temperate New Zealand and Oulu in cold Finland. The argument is that the mode of travel is what should be the focus in order to reduce transport footprint, and high-density settlement is meaningless if travel still largely depends on the car. In the future of sustainability, people do not have to reduce travel distance within the city, but they do need to make smarter choices of travel.