Evaluation of Energy Consumption and CO2 Emission Reduction Policies for Urban Transport with System Dynamics Approach

Abstract

The current trend of the global increase in energy consumption has presented societies with several major crises including environmental pollution and the acceleration of diminishing energy supplies. Energy storage and pollutant reduction in the city play a crucial role in the process of conserving the existing energy. In addition, the transportation sector should be emphasized due to its importance. Further, it can bring significant amounts of annual economic savings to the people and governments by reducing the energy consumption and adverse environmental effects, as well as reducing the travel time and unwanted delays. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine the most important parameters of environmental pollutant emissions in the urban transport sector and develop the system dynamics model of Tehran urban transport. To this aim, six scenarios including Business As Usual, Priority to the Development of Public Transport, Technical Progress, Administrative Rules and Regulations Management (ARM), Travel Demand Management (TDM), and Comprehensive Policy (CP) were quantitatively analyzed. Based on the results, both TDM and ARM scenarios were effective in the short term. Although CO2 emissions in the TDM scenario were estimated at about 155,072 million kilograms in 2015, which was better than all individual policies, the reduction of the ARM scenario was better after 2019 and the CO2 emissions of the ARM scenario were estimated to be 153,940 million kilograms in 2025. However, the CP scenario had generally the best performance compared with all the individual policies. Finally, by implementing the scenarios simultaneously, we observed that each plays a role in improving the situation while reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions significantly. In particular, CO2 emissions in the CP scenario were estimated to be 125,934 million kilograms by 2025.