Modern individual mobility

Abstract

The transport sector is responsible for almost 60% of the oil consumption or almost 30% of the total energy consumption in OECD countries (IEA 2011). The dominant share of this energy consumption is caused by individual passenger transport by roads and air transport. Even though technological progress has constantly improved the fuel efficiency of vehicles combustion engines, the energy consumption of individual road transports is constantly increasing, mainly due to increasing population and increasing distances travelled daily. This leads to an increase in CO2 emissions from road transport in the EU by 20% between 1990 and 2000 (de Haan et al. 2007). Thus, individual mobility is one of the most relevant and fastest growing contributors to climate change. Also, human-toxic emissions from this sector are not negligible despite increasingly rigorous emission standards. The daily limit values for PM10 and for NO2 in 2009 still exceeded at more than 30% of the traffic sites across Europe (EU-27) and (Kunzli et al. 2000) attributed about 3% of total mortality in Austria, France and Switzerland to air pollution of motorized road traffic. And also external costs from road passenger transport in the USA due to air pollution are estimated higher than those due to climate change (Delucchi and McCubbin 2011). From a global perspective, the transport sector is not only a very relevant but also a rapidly growing energy consumer: its share on worldwide primary energy consumption is expected to rise from 21.8% in 2000 to about 34% in 2050 (de Haan et al. 2007). Knowing that vehicle density per capita increases with increasing GDP (almost linear rise from 0 vehicles per capita at GDP 0 to 0.3 vehicles per capita at GDP $10,000) and considering that annual economic growth in emerging nations like India (population 1.2 billion, GDP per capita about $3,500, average annual growth ca. 7%) and China (population 1.3 billion, GDP per capita $7600, average annual growth rate ca. 10%) is considerable, a steep increase in vehicle numbers and kilometers driven is to be expected. By 2050 one expects 5 billion cars (2010: 1 billion) driving 50 trillion km per year, emitting 6 billion tons of CO2 (i.e. about 20% of overall annual emission in 2010). From this context, it is obvious that individual mobility is one of the most relevant issues in the discussions on climate change and urban pollution. Some years ago, biofuels were hoped to be the magic bullet to solve all problems. LCA, however, showed that even though many biofuels might have climate change mitigation potential, overall environmental effects of biofuel based mobility are often worse than for fossil fueled transports. And, just recently, the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency acknowledged a “serious error” in the greenhouse gas accounting methodology used for European Union regulations and policy targets.