The Impact of Vehicle Ownership on Carbon Emissions in the Transportation Sector

Abstract

As one of the important sources of carbon emissions, the transportation industry should be given attention. This study investigates the relationship between vehicle ownership, economic growth, and environmental pressure on the Chongqing transportation industry (CQTI) based on CQTI data, then constructs a comprehensive regression model and couples the EKC curve and Tapio model for integrated analysis, and finally constructs a LEAP-Chongqing model to forecast CQTI from multiple perspectives. The innovations are that the multi-model examines the effects of different variables and has a better classification of transportation modes in scenario simulation. The results show that: (1) there is an inverse N-shaped relationship between car ownership, economic growth, and environmental pressure of CQTI; (2) every 1% of transportation output, urbanization rate, or car ownership will cause 0.769%, 0.111%, and 0.096% of carbon emission change, respectively; (3) gasoline, diesel and aviation kerosene consumption account for 80–90%, private cars cause 41–52% of carbon emissions, and the energy structure and transportation structure of CQTI are unreasonable; (4) the results of a multi-scenario simulation show that the energy saving and emission reduction effect of a single policy is not satisfactory, and the integration of energy saving and emission reduction measures should be strengthened.