Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment

About Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment — Journal Profile

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, usually shortened to Transportation Research Part D or TRD, is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Elsevier. Its print ISSN is 1361-9209 and its electronic ISSN is 1879-2340. Those two identifiers, taken from the journal's own Elsevier and ScienceDirect listings, are the safest way to distinguish this title from every other journal that shares the words transportation, research, transport or environment — and, more importantly, from the other lettered parts of the Transportation Research family. The journal has been published since 1996, the coverage span recorded for the title in bibliographic listings, and it belongs to the United Kingdom arm of Elsevier's publishing operation, with the publisher address historically given as Kidlington, Oxford. The Journals World record that this profile enriches — post 334901, carrying the slug with a -2 suffix — records exactly that Elsevier identity and exactly those two ISSNs, so there is no identity conflict between the record and the journal itself.

What TRD does, in one sentence, is publish original research on the environmental impacts of transportation, on policy responses to those impacts, and on what both mean for the design, planning and management of transportation systems. That sentence is not a paraphrase invented for this page: it is the core of the aims and scope statement that Elsevier itself publishes on ScienceDirect and repeats in its journal shop. Everything else in this profile follows from it. This is not a general transport engineering journal, not a general environmental science journal, and not a vehicle technology journal that happens to mention emissions. Its centre of gravity is the interaction between a transport system and the environment around it — an interaction that can be studied at the scale of a single street, a city network, a national freight system, or the global atmosphere.

At a Glance

Place Inside the Transportation Research Family

New readers often meet TRD first through its name, and the name needs unpacking because it is the single most common source of miscitation for this journal. Elsevier publishes a family of Transportation Research journals distinguished by a letter. Part A is concerned with policy and practice, Part B with methodological work, Part C with emerging technologies, Part E with logistics and transportation review topics, and Part F with traffic psychology and behaviour. Those are different journals, with different editors, different scopes and different ISSNs. A paper about a new traffic-flow model with no environmental question belongs, if anywhere in the family, with the methodological or technology titles. A paper about how a low-emission zone changed air quality, travel behaviour and health in a city belongs with Part D. Citing “Transportation Research” without the part letter, or submitting an environmental-impact manuscript to the wrong part, are both avoidable errors, and checking the ISSN on the journal homepage — 1361-9209 for Part D — settles the question in seconds.

Part D also has to be separated from journals outside the family whose titles look close on a search-results page. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives is a separate, newer Elsevier title. Transport Policy, Journal of Transport and Health, Journal of Cleaner Production and Atmospheric Environment all publish work that a TRD author might read or cite, and some TRD papers could plausibly have been sent to one of them instead. The deciding test is the one in the journal's own scope statement: does the paper take a transportation system as its object and an environmental impact, or a policy response to that impact, as its question? If the environment is background scenery rather than the question, the paper is probably aimed at the wrong journal.

Scope in Detail

Elsevier's scope statement is deliberately broad about modes and deliberately narrow about questions. Submissions are invited that analyse broad environmental impacts from all existing and emerging modes of both passenger and freight transportation. That includes road, rail, maritime and air transport, and ground modes more generally, as well as the infrastructure that supports them — papers dealing with transportation infrastructure and the environment are expressly considered. The impacts considered are equally wide. The expanded statement of the scope, as reproduced in university library listings of the journal, lists impacts on travel behaviour, air quality, ecosystems, the global climate, public health, land use, economic development and quality of life. A local study of noise or pollutant exposure beside one corridor and a global study of resource depletion or atmospheric pollution from transport as a whole are both, in principle, inside the same journal, provided each one says something that travels beyond its own case.

That last condition is the journal's real filter, and authors should read it twice. Elsevier states that the emphasis is on original scientific findings and on innovative policy responses of a regulatory, planning, technical or fiscal nature, and that articles should demonstrate generalisable policy and methodological relevance to research and practice. In plain terms, a competent case study that reports only what happened in one place, with no transferable lesson, no policy implication and no methodological contribution, is a weak TRD submission however carefully the fieldwork was done. A case study that uses one place to test a policy instrument, to compare interventions, to reveal a mechanism, or to show why an expected effect did not occur is much closer to what the editors ask for. The journal also says plainly that submissions should not be primarily modelling exercises without a clear policy-driven scope: a model earns its place by delving into impacts and into solutions that improve environmental outcomes, not by existing as a technical demonstration.

Environmental impacts of transport systems

The first large territory is measurement and explanation of impacts themselves: emissions inventories and exposure studies, air-quality and noise effects, ecosystem and land-use consequences of networks and terminals, energy use and resource depletion, and the climate footprint of passenger and freight movement. Strong papers in this territory connect a transport activity to an environmental outcome through a defensible method, quantify uncertainty where they can, and explain why the size or distribution of the effect matters for decisions. Distributional questions matter here as well: who lives beside the freight corridor, who breathes the port's air, and who gains or loses when a network is redesigned are environmental questions in this journal, not afterthoughts.

Policy responses — regulatory, planning, technical and fiscal

The second territory is response. Regulatory responses include emission standards, access restrictions and low-emission zones. Planning responses include land-use and network decisions that change how much travel a place generates and by which modes. Technical responses include vehicle, fuel, infrastructure and operational changes evaluated for their environmental effect in real systems rather than in the laboratory alone. Fiscal responses include pricing, taxation, subsidies and incentive schemes, from congestion and carbon pricing to purchase incentives for cleaner vehicles. TRD is a natural home for evaluation work: ex-ante appraisal of a proposed measure, ex-post evaluation of a measure that was actually implemented, and comparative work that asks why the same instrument performed differently in different settings.

Sustainability, resilience and a changing climate

Papers on the sustainability and resilience of transport systems and their infrastructure, and on the impacts of a changing climate on cities, regions and networks, are expressly welcomed in the current scope. This is where adaptation sits alongside mitigation: heat, flooding, storms and sea-level change threaten networks that were designed for a different climate, and the environmental and social costs of failure, closure and reconstruction are part of this journal's remit. Work that treats resilience only as an engineering redundancy question, without the environmental and community consequences, will usually need reframing before it fits.

The Disasters and Resilience section

TRD carries a dedicated section on Disasters and Resilience, with its own section editors — a structural detail stated in the official aims and scope, and one that tells authors a great deal about how seriously the journal takes the theme. The section's rationale, in Elsevier's wording, is that transportation plays a critical role in the resilience of communities, that disasters are unexpected, low-probability events which can overwhelm the capacity of systems to function and to provide vital services supporting human health, environmental quality and economic and social livelihoods, and that transport systems are essential to effective disaster response, relief, recovery and mitigation. The section invites researchers from multiple disciplines to apply transportation science — its theories, methods and tools — to increasing societal resilience against all hazards, natural and human-made. Evacuation, emergency access, supply movement after a disaster, restoration of lifeline services, and the long tail of recovery are therefore in scope for this journal in a way that surprises readers who know it only for emissions work.

History and Development

Bibliographic listings give the journal's coverage as beginning in 1996. That date places TRD's founding in the decade when environmental appraisal of transport moved from a specialist concern to a central question of transport policy: urban air-quality crises, the first serious climate-policy commitments, and growing evidence on the health effects of traffic-related pollution all created a readership for a journal that refused to treat environmental effects as external to transport research. The title has kept the same two-part form — the family name plus a subtitle naming its territory — throughout that run, and the ISSN pair on the current record matches the pair recorded for the title in earlier listings, which is the practical test that the journal a reader finds in a 1990s citation and the journal on ScienceDirect today are one continuous publication rather than a relaunched namesake.

The journal's development since then can be read in the widening of its scope language. The core promise has not changed — environmental impacts, policy responses, implications for design, planning and management — but the stated examples have expanded to foreground public health, ecosystems, climate impacts on infrastructure, sustainability and resilience, and a standing disasters section. That evolution mirrors the field: electrification of road transport, decarbonisation of shipping and aviation, active travel, and climate adaptation have all moved from the margins of transport-and-environment research to its centre, and a journal founded in 1996 that had kept a 1996 definition of its territory would by now be missing most of its own subject.

What the Journal Publishes

The form of publication is the original research paper, joined by review articles: the aims are framed around research papers that analyse impacts and responses, and library descriptions of the journal describe it as publishing original research and review articles. In practice, a successful TRD manuscript usually does four things in sequence. It defines a transport–environment problem precisely enough that another researcher could locate the same problem elsewhere. It sets out a method — empirical, evaluative, comparative, experimental or model-based — that fits the question and whose limits are stated rather than hidden. It reports findings that change what a reader believes about the size, cause, distribution or tractability of the impact. And it draws the policy or practice implication out explicitly, showing how a regulator, planner, operator or funder should act differently because this work exists. Reviews earn their place the same way, by synthesising a literature into a structure that lets the next study, and the next policy, be better designed — not by summarising papers in the order they were published.

Interdisciplinary work is not merely tolerated; the journal encourages it and asks that submissions appeal to readers from a wide range of disciplines. That request has practical consequences for writing. A transport economist, an atmospheric scientist, a civil engineer, a geographer, a public-health researcher and a city planner may all review or read the same paper. Jargon that is unremarkable inside one discipline therefore needs a sentence of explanation, methods need to be reported in enough detail for a competent outsider to judge them, and the significance of a result needs to be stated in terms of the shared problem — cleaner, safer, more resilient movement of people and goods — rather than only in terms of a home discipline's internal debate.

Editorial Process and How to Submit

Submissions are made through Elsevier's ScienceDirect-linked editorial system for the journal, and the authoritative instructions are the journal's own Guide for Authors on ScienceDirect, which should be checked at the time of submission because Elsevier updates its requirements on article structure, data statements, declarations and artwork without notice to third-party listings. Three preparation points follow directly from the scope rather than from formatting rules, and they decide more TRD outcomes than any reference style. First, state the environmental question and the policy or management implication in the abstract itself, so that an editor screening for fit can see them without excavation. Second, make the generalisable claim explicit — a short passage near the end of the introduction, and again in the discussion, that says what a reader in another city, country or mode should take from the study. Third, if the paper is primarily a modelling contribution, show the policy-driven application inside the paper, with real or realistic impact outcomes, rather than promising it for future work. Papers aimed at the Disasters and Resilience section should say so and should address response, relief, recovery or mitigation consequences for communities, not only network performance statistics.

Charges, open-access options, embargo and licensing terms for Elsevier journals change over time and differ by article and by author agreement. No fee figure is stated in this profile, because a durable, journal-specific figure could not be verified from the journal's own pages for this page: authors who need the current article publishing charge or subscription route should read the journal's pages on ScienceDirect at the moment they submit, and should treat any fee quoted on an unofficial listing site as unverified until they see it there.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

TRD is a long-established, widely indexed Elsevier title, and the thin Journals World record for its twin post reported an h-index of 167 for the journal. Third-party metric listings for recent years place the journal in the top quartile of its subject categories, with Journal Impact Factor values reported in the region of seven for the 2022–2023 cycles on those listings. Those numbers are quoted here only as an orientation, with their source type named, for a deliberate reason: citation metrics are recalculated annually, differ between the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus-based CiteScore families, and are routinely mis-copied between aggregator sites with the year silently dropped. A reader who needs the figure for a tenure file, a funder report or a submission decision should take it from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports or from Scopus / SCImago for the exact year in question, and cite that year alongside the number. What can be said without a year attached, and what the age, publisher, indexing history and citation record of the title jointly support, is that TRD is one of the principal international venues for transport-and-environment research — the journal researchers in this niche cite when they situate new work, and the journal policy evaluations in this niche are expected to reckon with.

Who Reads It, and When to Choose It

Choose TRD when your contribution is a transport–environment contribution: when the finding would matter to someone designing, regulating, pricing, planning or cleaning up a transport system, and when you can state a lesson that survives leaving your study site. Choose it for evaluations of environmental policy instruments in transport, for health and exposure work tied to transport sources, for freight and maritime or aviation environmental studies with a policy edge, for climate adaptation and disaster-resilience work centred on transport's role in communities, and for interdisciplinary studies that need an audience spanning engineering, planning, economics, geography and environmental science. Do not choose it for a purely technical vehicle or materials advance with no system-level environmental evaluation, for a transport method with no environmental application in the paper, or for a single-site description with no transferable conclusion — each of those will fit a sibling or neighbouring journal better, and a fast desk decision on scope grounds helps nobody.

For readers rather than authors, the journal is a way to follow how a field argues with itself. Reading several recent issues in sequence shows the recurring tensions clearly: how quickly electrification actually cleans urban air once fleet turnover, electricity generation and non-exhaust particles are counted; whether pricing measures reduce emissions equitably or simply price lower-income travellers off the road; how ports and shipping can decarbonise without shifting pollution elsewhere; and how networks built for efficiency cope when a flood, fire or storm removes a link they assumed would always be there. Those are live policy questions in most countries, which is why the journal's readership extends well beyond universities into agencies, consultancies and operators.

Relationship to the Other Journals World Record

Readers of this site should know that Journals World carries two records for this same journal. The record at the base slug, post 7860, titled with a colon as “Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment”, is thin, at about 294 words in the version checked for this profile, and gives the same print ISSN, 1361-9209. This record, post 334901, gives ISSNs 1361-9209 and 1879-2340 and names Elsevier BV as publisher. The ISSN evidence shows that the two records describe one journal, not two, and the pair is flagged here so that a future merge can preserve the fuller profile on a single record. Nothing in that duplication changes the identity of the journal profiled above; it is a catalogue issue, not a bibliographic ambiguity about the title itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Transportation Research Part D the same journal as Transportation Research Part A? No. The letter identifies a separate journal in the same Elsevier family, with its own scope and ISSN. Part D is the transport-and-environment title, ISSN 1361-9209.

Does the journal publish work on freight and maritime transport, or only passenger travel? Both. The scope expressly covers all existing and emerging modes of passenger and freight transportation, and names maritime and air transport alongside ground modes.

Is a pure modelling paper in scope? Only if it has a clear policy-driven application to impacts and to solutions that improve environmental outcomes, demonstrated inside the paper. The scope warns against submissions that are primarily modelling exercises.

What is the Disasters and Resilience section? A standing section of the journal, with dedicated section editors, for work on transport's role in disaster response, relief, recovery and mitigation, and in increasing societal resilience to natural and human-made hazards.

Where do I check the current impact factor or article charges? In the Journal Citation Reports or Scopus for metrics, by year, and on the journal's own ScienceDirect pages for submission and publishing charges at the time you submit. Figures on aggregator sites are often undated and should not be relied on for a formal record.

Summary

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment (ISSN 1361-9209; e-ISSN 1879-2340), published by Elsevier since 1996, is the specialist journal for the meeting point of transportation systems and their environment. It publishes original, interdisciplinary research on environmental impacts across all passenger and freight modes and on the regulatory, planning, technical and fiscal responses to those impacts, requiring generalisable policy and methodological relevance from what it accepts, and it maintains a dedicated Disasters and Resilience section for transport's role in community resilience. For authors with a transport–environment question and a lesson that travels, it remains one of the defining venues in its field.