Rational planning strategies of urban structure, metro, and car use for reducing transport carbon dioxide emissions in developing cities

Abstract

Understanding transport carbon dioxide (CO2) emission impact factors’ effects is important for the rational planning strategy making in reducing the emissions. This study determines transport emission impact factors’ heterogeneous effects and proposes urban and transport planning strategies in typical developing cities. Quantile regression is applied to overcome the insufficiency of factors’ mean effects and to avoid the biased estimations when the outcome variable is non-normally distributed and heteroscedastic. It is found that, from the low emitters at the 10th quantile to the high emitters at the 90th quantile, transport emissions’ increasing rates are 8.8 times and 79.6 times that of car availability and home-to-center/subcenter distance (HCD/HSD), respectively. When commute distance reaches 5.8 km or farther, and car availability percentage is 41.2% or greater, the effects that metro services have on reducing emissions decrease by 37.8%. Polycentric and satellite city forms can greatly reduce emission increases, which are caused by HCD growth when HCD is more than 10–15 km. According to these findings, the following planning strategies are recommended, including limiting oil-fueled car use to about 40% among the urban residents, forming employment and life circles within a 5–6 km radius, allocating better public transit services around metro stations, providing high service levels of bicycle lanes, pedestrian streets, and greenways to attract more transfers to metros, controlling urban radius within 10–15 km under the monocentric pattern, and fostering polycentric structures and satellite cities when city continuously sprawls. This study can provide empirical evidence and reference value globally.