Modelling household travel energy consumption and CO2 emissions based on the spatial form of neighborhoods and streets: A case study of Jinan, China

Abstract

This paper presents a direct modelling approach to evaluate household travel energy consumption and CO2 emissions based on the spatial form of neighborhoods and streets. It integrates one multinomial logit model and four double hurdle models to predict travel outcomes: vehicle ownership portfolio choice, car travel distance, bus travel distance, motorcycle travel distance and ebike travel distance. The energy consumption and CO2 emissions are then estimated using these travel outcomes. A full application of the modelling approach is demonstrated through a pilot project in Jinan, China. A holdout validation is also performed to address the over-fitting problem of models calibrated from the training set data. Results show that the proposed approach is operational and appropriate for sketch planning applications to promote clean energy and low carbon city planning in urbanizing China.