Challenges for sustainable urban transportation in Turkey

In the last decade, concerns about the climate change, social needs, economic vitality, the loss of energy resources and the pollution have raised a growing interest towards sustainable development. One of the key contributors to sustainable development is the transportation, in particular, the urban transportation. This paper is concerned with the sustainable urban transportation challenges in the metropolises of Turkey. A brief review of the state-of-the-art in sustainable urban transportation is followed by a discussion on some of the new research areas. A special care is given to explore the role of sustainability in extending the well-known operations research problems; such as, traffic assignment, network design, large-scale simulations, multi-modal transportation, and so on. The paper concludes with proposing possible solution approaches for some of the considered challenges.