Analyzing Transportation Logistics and Infrastructure Sustainability in the Iberian Peninsula: The Case of Portugal Mainland

ABSTRACT

Transportation is one of the most meaningful references of unsustainability in regional urban areas. This difficulty is stimulating urban planners and decision-makers to introduce the concept of sustainability into their policy design at multiple levels. Contextually, through exploratory tools, the present study aims to analyze the impacts over the socio-economic sphere that those new plans could bring to the region and the local populations of Portugal Mainland. Also, analyses of regional disparities in Portugal focused on the socio-economic aspects and analyses on territorial cohesion concept where indicators organized in policy-oriented territorial objectives and then combined with an analytical framework. Besides, the study especially intends to cover sustainable accessibility (also one of the components of territorial cohesion), which aims to help regional planners determine the inherent obstacles and design possible alternatives at the strategic planning level for sustainable regional transport and land-use arrangement. The study shows that exist inequalities in the distribution of absolute accessibility. Value of accessibility in category “very high” in 192 towns (68,57%) settlements, in the central, coastal territory along the dual carriageway and national road corridors, live 81,7% population. Nevertheless, the regional inequalities pattern did not vary considerably in Portugal's last decade of funding policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-economic analysis
• sustainable and equity planning
• sustainable development
• territorial cohesion
• territorial accessibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Conflicts of interest

The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Authors’ contributions

All the authors contributed equally during all the process of this work preparation.

Additional information

Funding

The project is funded under the programme of the Minister of Science and Higher Education titled ‘Regional Initiative of Excellence’ in 2019-2022, project number 018/RID/2018/19, the amount of funding PLN 10 788 423,16.