Ecology and Mobility: Transportation Strategy as a Key to Sustainable Urban Development

In the past decades, the world's population has been rapidly increasing, with more and more people migrating to large cities. By 1990, approximately 45% of the world's population resided in cities. On average, the urban population increased by about 50 million people annually. [1] By the late 1980s, there were 2,500 large cities worldwide, encompassing over a third of the global population. However, with this growth comes an escalating set of issues stemming from inadequate territorial planning. Among these issues are overloaded transportation networks, smog, leading to health and environmental hazards. The environmental deterioration in cities, especially in urbanized areas, is a pertinent problem in Ukraine as well. The ecological state of a city is intricately linked to its overall socio-economic situation and the implementation of urban environmental, planning, and housing policies. Air pollution, the state of drinking water sources, inadequate handling of solid household and industrial waste negatively impact the population's health. But the most acute environmental issue in cities is air pollution primarily caused by transportation, energy complex enterprises, and other industrial facilities. Revisiting approaches to managing transportation infrastructure in Ukrainian cities involves redesigning road networks to reduce traffic congestion and establishing areas with lower CO2 emissions. This necessitates the update of tools supporting ecological and energy security. Hence, the implementation of initiatives to reform the transportation system on principles of sustainable development becomes highly crucial. One of the paths in this direction involves optimizing transportation flows within cities and constructing bypass roads.