Based in the current growth rate of metropolitan areas, providing
infrastructures and services to allow the safe, quick and sustainable
mobility of people and goods, is increasingly challenging. The European
Union has been promoting diverse initiatives towards sustainable
transport development and environment protection by setting targets
for changes in the sector, as those proposed in the 2011 White Paper on
transport. Under this context, this study aims at evaluating the environmental
performance of the transport sector in the 28 European Union
countries, from 2015 to 2017, towards the policy agenda established in
strategic documents. The assessment of the transport environmental performance
was made through the aggregation of seven sub-indicators into
a composite indicator using a Data Envelopment Analysis approach. The
model used to determine the weights to aggregate the sub-indicators is
based on a variant of the Bene t of the Doubt model with virtual proportional
weights restrictions. The results indicate that, overall, the European
Union countries had almost no variation on its transport environmental
performance during the time span under analysis. The ine cient
countries can improve the transport sustainability mainly by drastically
reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels combustion, increasing
the share of freight transport that uses rail and waterways and
also the share of transport energy from renewable sources.
