MSLS students Juliette Ténart, James Vierling, and Michael Fellner have finished their A-grade master thesis “Barriers and Best Practices to the Use of Public Transportation: A Case Study of the South Baltic Sea Region”, which was supervised partly by the SustainTrans team. It was created within the INTERCONNECT project and the students provide great help throughout the workshops that where held in Karlskrona, Gdynia, and Klaipeda this year.

MSLS INTERCONNECT thesis team 2018. James (to the left), Juliette, and Michael (to the right).

Thesis abstract:

Climate change is a pressing issue caused by the systematic increase of greenhouse gasses (GHG). One way to avoid higher GHG emissions is through an increased use of public transportation, transitioning society away from the personal automobile. Public transportation is more sustainable than the personal automobile as its emissions per person are less and it takes up significantly less space. Sustainability is defined through the principle-based definition of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD). 

This research studied barriers and best practices to the use of public transportation in the South Baltic Sea Region (SBSR), in cooperation with the EU funded InterConnect Project. The research team was able to use the resources of the InterConnect Project for their methods in order to discover perceived barriers and potential best practices and ideas to overcome these barriers through the stakeholder perspective. 

The research team concludes that by addressing the perceived barriers, a first step towards transitioning society within the SBSR towards more sustainable transportation can be done. As transportation is complex and connected to other systems, the need for a systems perspective and a strategic and collaborative approach was identified. This could be achieved through using the FSSD in the SBSR. 

The thesis is published as:

Fellner, M., James, V., & Ténart, J. (2018). Barriers and Best Practices to the Use of Public Transportation: A Case Study of the South Baltic Sea Region. (K.-H. Robèrt, P. Johnson, & S. Borén, Eds.). Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona. Retrieved from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-16432

You can read the whole thesis at the Diva portal.