OPEN ACCESS *Correspondence to : In-Soo Suh Professor, Graduate School for Green Transportation, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea E-mail : insoo.suh@kaist.ac.kr World Technopolis Review Copyright©World Technopolis Association This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attri- bution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited Future Urban Transportation Technologies for Sustainability with an Emphasis on Growing Mega Cities: A Strategic Proposal on Introducing a New Micro Electric Vehicle Segment Emilio Honey 1 , Hojin Lee 1 , and In-Soo Suh* 2 Graduate Student, Graduate School for Green Transportation, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea 1 Professor, Graduate School for Green Transportation, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea 2 1. INTRODUCTION While some new transportation services and technologies have started to disseminate in recent years, the current transportation regime is still largely composed of two alter- natives: (1) Fixed route public transportation, and (2) pri- vate ownership of one or more all-purpose internal combustion engine (ICE) powered vehicles per household. While these two modes have so far served the personal transportation market reasonably, there is still a large por- tion of transportation needs which are not adequately served by either and could be adequately served at a signifcantly reduced fnancial, social and environmental cost by other modes (Roos and Alshuler 1975). One of the methods to cover this “transportation gap” is by the use of reduced sized and capability vehicles or Minimum Attribute Vehicles (MAVs), particularly those with electric powertrains (Spar- row and Whitford 1984). The main motivation for electric vehicles is that they are sig- nifcantly more effcient in terms of cost, space and energy when compared to typical ICE cars. A two passenger car is about ten times more energy effcient than an ICE car, and, if adopted under shared ownership, it can have 70% lower oper- ational costs and 80% lower initial costs than individual owner- ship of present all-purpose vehicles (Burns 2013). Abstract : The current transportation regime is largely based on two alternatives: (1) fixed route public transit, and (2) private ownership of internal com- bustion engine (ICE) powered vehicles per households. This paper analyzes one possible transportation alternative, Micro Electric Vehicles or MEVs, and compares with the ICE vehicles in terms of social, economic and environmental benefits, especially emphasizing its environmental advantage over ICE vehicles for future sustainability. While some representative models of MEVs exist in a limited market capacity, but global technical standards are generally insufficient and non-homogenous across nations, which restricts the development of the proposed transpor- tation sector. The focus of this paper is to analyze the characteristics and potential benefits of MEVs in economical and environmental perspectives, including development status and technical standards, with a particular focus in the E.U., the U.S., Japan, and Korea. Based on the data of analysis, this paper aims to derive and propose a cooperative and adaptive global policy framework designed to speed up adoption and expansion of the global MEV market, including passenger and utility vehicles. We propose MEV to be a new mobility segment in the global transportation market because of their advantage in environmental impact, sustainability, overall cost of ownership, and safety. Keywords: Micro Electric Vehicle, MEV, Quadricycle, Sustainability, Safety, Fuel Economy, CO2 WTR 2014;3:139-152 http://dx.doi.org/10.7165/wtr2014.3.3.139 139 2014 Copyright©World Technopolis Association Article