Analysis of emerging trends in sustainable transportation: designing a framework for the transformation of urban transportation policy and planning models

Behzadfar, Mostafa; Rezayi, Shahriyar; Torkaman, Maryam; Razzaghi, Fatemeh

doi:10.22034/uep.2026.577735.1853

Analysis of emerging trends in sustainable transportation: designing a framework for the transformation of urban transportation policy and planning models

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Mostafa Behzadfar ¹

Shahriyar Rezayi ²

Maryam Torkaman ³

Fatemeh Razzaghi ⁴

¹ Department of Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Environmental Design, Iran Science and Technology University, Tehran, Iran

² Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Architecture and Art, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran

³ Department of Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Environmental Design, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

⁴ Urban Planning Department, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

10.22034/uep.2026.577735.1853

Abstract

Sustainable transportation, as one of the fundamental pillars of sustainable development, plays a significant role in reducing environmental impacts and improving the quality of life. The present study aimed to identify scientific trends, detect research gaps, and reveal emerging directions in sustainable transportation studies. This research adopts a bibliometric approach. The data were retrieved from the Scopus database through a systematic search covering the period from 2000 to 2024. In the initial stage, 1,522 records were identified. After removing 87 duplicate documents, 1,435 records remained for the preliminary screening stage. Subsequently, based on the review of titles and abstracts, 1,018 irrelevant documents were excluded. Following a full‑text assessment of the remaining 418 records, a total of 269 articles were selected for the final analysis. The analyses included co‑word, co‑authorship, and co‑citation analyses, and conceptual maps, as well as scientific clusters were generated using VOSviewer and SciMAT software. The findings indicate that the literature on sustainable transportation is concentrated in several major conceptual clusters. The most prominent themes include sustainable urban transportation planning, reduction of transportation‑related emissions, and the development of clean technologies, particularly electric vehicles. In terms of scientific output, the United States and China were identified as the leading contributors in this field. At the institutional level, Arizona State University, Colorado State University, and Sharif University of Technology emerged as the most prominent research institutions in sustainable transportation studies. The results also highlight the growing attention to emerging topics such as electric vehicles and shared mobility systems. However, areas such as rural transportation sustainability and social equity in transportation have received comparatively limited attention, indicating the presence of notable research gaps in this field.

Keywords

Climate sustainability

shared mobility

sustainable development

sustainable transportation

VOSviewer visualization tool

zero carbon infrastructure

Subjects

Urban Studies

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