“SUSTAIN”
Best practices, benchmarking, guidelines and recommendations for Sustainable Stations
Final report

Submitted to UIC by IZT – Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment, Germany and
Macroplan Consulting, Denmark

Sustainable Development is today a broadly accepted strategic concept for responsible politics, economy and the future development of the society as a whole. Within the last decade, more and more influential companies – railway companies among them - have implemented their own sustainability strategies in order to strengthen a future-proof path for their development. Regarding railway stations, there are initiatives and pilot projects for the improvement of the sustainability
performance at pioneering companies. But so far, there is no fully developed and commonly accepted sustainability strategy for railway stations across the sector which would include the definition of strategic objectives, performance indicators and the implementation of a common monitoring system.

Railway stations play an important role in the transportation system and they are developing more and more into mobility hubs with interfaces to the other transport modes and with a broad spectrum of functionalities and offered public and private services. A commonly developed and accepted sustainability strategy for railway stations could strengthen their roles not only in the transportation system but also in the society as a whole and open the way towards a greener, interconnected,
socially more responsible and more efficient mobility and at the time towards more sustainable communities. The ultimate goal of an integrated sustainability strategy is to improve stations’ attractiveness by enhancing customer safety and experience, increasing overall revenues and on top of that reducing negative environmental effects.

The SUSTAIN project wants to contribute to the development of a consensual sustainability strategy for railway stations by disseminating best practice examples and encourage knowledge sharing for all relevant areas of sustainability, providing an easy to use tool for the assessment of the sustainability performance of railway stations, giving recommendations for the practical improvement of the sustainability performance and outlining a future standardization process in this field.