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The paper moves from the scientific literature on Road Ecology and Railway Ecology to merge related concepts and criteria under a single definition: Ecology of Transportation Infrastructure (ETI). Common traits are the negative impacts generated by road and rail infrastructure on natural ecosystems, resulting in habitat loss or fragmentation for flora and fauna. Although not much addressed within transportation studies, the ETI contribution is crucial when addressing the enforcement of regulations in the fields of strategic environmental evaluation for transportation projects and planning, with a focus on landscaping issues. To this end, evaluation criteria are proposed to meet the regulations requirements, along with the main measures to implement. The goal is to increase awareness among transportation researchers and operators of the need to introduce ETI in studies and practice on construction, maintenance and evaluation of railway infrastructures, as a criterion to meet the environmental requirements. Thus, the paper is structured as follows: the development of the fundamental concepts and the related literature review is reported (Section 1) and the relevance within the regulatory tools on environmental assessments at landscape scale is stressed along with some factors of complexity affecting the process (Section 2); eventually, ETI criteria and measures to implement ETI with a focus on railways lines and artifacts are described (Section 3), and guidelines to assess their effectiveness within planning decision-making processes are proposed (Section 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 containment measures are parts of the key strategies is to reduce human mobility to slow down the spread, thus at a crossroad with transport policy and affecting travel behaviors. In this paper, based on information collected with expert questionnaire and supported by a literature review, we carried out an analysis on how transport policy is affected through various COVID-19 containment measures. Our analysis shows that the COVID-19 measures on public transport are virtually all restrictive, calling for additional behavioral changes, typically wearing face masks and enforced on a precautionary basis, since there seems no epidemiological consensus that public transport is a high-risk superspreading environment at the current status of knowledge. Moreover, from the result of the expert questionnaire, it is clear that a large variety of measures has been enforced, in response to the specific problem of containment, thus demonstrating that there was neither preparedness nor common vision among the public transport operators. On the contrary, for private motorized transport, COVID-19 measures are often oriented on ease of existing restrictions and regulations. This is not in line with the principle of sustainable transport policies to encourage the use of active modes and public transport and to discourage the use of private motorized modes. It shows the vulnerability of current transport policy and policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]