Abstract

Increasing population in urban areas necessitates increasing levels of mix and modes of transportation, roads, land use, which all lead to pollution and waste of all sorts. Usu- ally longer, wider and larger urban and interurban roads for motorized vehicles lead to further increases in number of cars with fewer, usually single, people in them, forming an unavoidable basis of an unsustainable society and mobility. In order to achieve sus- tainable cities and economies, in addition to smart use of land, intelligent transportation systems, clean and green vehicles, it is vital to achieve social behavioral change for shift- ing our modes of mobility from motorized means to cleaner, greener, healthier and more economic means such as walking, cycling, and public transportation. Economic, environ- mental, and social concerns about growth of traffic and congestion have caused several mega cities in the world and academics towards the investigations and introduction of different policies and measures in urban areas. Among many policy options, Travel De- mand Management (TDM) policies mainly aim to promote the sustainable modes and to increase an effective use of existing infrastructure by voluntarily controlling the de- mand. With such circumstances, the objectives of this study are as follows: (1) to review existing academic, industrial, governmental and non-governmental literature to examine and understand various sustainable society, sustainable development, sustainable mobil- ity concepts, mechanisms and policies developed and tested in other parts of the world; (2) to establish a framework of social behavioral change policies particularly developed and tested for urban mobility and traffic; (3) to compare various mega-cities on different indicators to better understand the case of Istanbul; (4) to evaluate potentials of TDM policies in Istanbul as well as to find out traffic congestion perception of the residents by conducting face-to-face surveys; (5) to determine current conditions of traffic congestion in Istanbul for the projections of traffic conditions in the coming years of 2018 and 2023, with the help of determined potentials from the survey results under different scenarios by using a micro simulation program PTV VISSIM. As a result of this study, it was revealed that the traffic conditions in Istanbul tend to become worse year by year, but it was also seen that the TDM policies offers noteworthy potential for increased use of sustainable mobility modes and to help significantly reducing congestion levels.