The assessment of transportation social sustainability appeals to many scholars as an essential issue but imposes a risk of selecting inadequate factors and methods to measure social phenomena. In this study, based on an extensive review, we identify the measurable key social indicators (instead of the economic or environmental factors commonly used) and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework for relative performance analysis of social sustainability in the regional context. This work is the first attempt to assess regional social sustainability of transport explicitly utilizing a multi-output performance measure. We use Shannon entropy to combine the results of selected data envelopment analysis (DEA) models into a unified social sustainability performance score. The method is applied to regional road transport in the European Union (EU) member states for the period 2004–2017. The empirical section explores individual profiles of EU countries, compares the states grouped into two clusters of old (EU-15) and new (EU-13) EU members, and examines their social sustainability performance over time. The analysis suggests that considering only social factors in the measurement eliminates the bias resulting from the inclusion of economic factors. As a result, our method prevents inaccurate inflation of the scores of more economically advanced countries. The findings also draw attention to the car dependence problem associated with high motorization rates in affluent EU-15 states. The study confirms the capacity of the proposed DEA-based framework to serve as an adequate tool for measuring the social sustainability of transport, which can support policymakers by providing useful benchmarks employing social factors.

交通社会可持续性的评估作为一个基本问题吸引了许多学者，但也存在选择不适当的因素和方法来衡量社会现象的风险。在本研究中，基于广泛的审查，我们确定了可衡量的关键社会指标（而不是常用的经济或环境因素），并提出了一个综合评估框架，用于区域背景下社会可持续性的相对绩效分析。这项工作是首次尝试明确利用多输出绩效衡量指标来评估交通的区域社会可持续性。我们使用香农熵将选定的数据包络分析 (DEA) 模型的结果组合成统一的社会可持续性绩效评分。该方法适用于欧盟 (EU) 成员国 2004-2017 年的区域道路运输。实证部分探讨了欧盟国家的个人概况，比较了分为旧 (EU-15) 和新 (EU-13) 欧盟成员国两个集群的国家，并检查了它们随时间推移的社会可持续性表现。分析表明，在测量中只考虑社会因素可以消除因包含经济因素而产生的偏差。因此，我们的方法可以防止对经济较发达的国家的分数进行不准确的通货膨胀。调查结果还引起人们对与富裕的 EU-15 国家的高机动化率相关的汽车依赖问题的关注。