Orthodoxy or opportunity: the difficult match between the environmental and social justice dimensions of sustainable mobility

In the field of mobility and environment, recently a number of promising developments can be observed. Despite the sustainability optimism emerging from such observations, the Club of Rome question whether there are any limits to growth is increasingly relevant. Perhaps even more important, policies with respect to mobility, accessibility and environmental impact seem not to contribute automatically to social justice. Through adding a limits-to-growth stance and a social justice perspective to what is called the orthodox sustainable mobility vision, we argue that all possible controversies on environmental impacts eventually boil down to an ethical debate. Such debates are not the exclusive domain of experts, hence we state that ‘there are no experts in sustainable mobility’. Experts can nevertheless play a particular role in discussions on sustainable mobility. In order to make our ideas tangible and to demonstrate the consequences, we apply this to a number of policy decisions in Belgium that carry the "sustainable mobility" label. Starting from our Belgian case study, in the conclusions we adopt again a global perspective, in which we stress the importance of looking for synergies between those environmental and social justice measures that allow for accounting the ethical dimension of sustainable mobility debates.