Transportation stakeholders usually focus on user prices and low production costs to increase competitiveness, without taking into consideration that cost reductions increase demand for transportation, leading to negative environmental impacts and infrastructure shortages/congestion, depending on the region.

A solution to this issue is to invest in transport eco-innovations, which produce economic long-term benefits that out-weight short-term losses. Moreover, from a macro-economic perspective eco-innovation can also help to relieve market failures. For this reason, when assessing economic impacts of sustainable mobility it is necessary to move away from the common one-dimensional approach (the user prospective) and introduce multiple perspectives (e.g., the macro-economy, the distribution of impacts across social groups or across regions, global competitiveness.).