WITHDRAWN: Evaluating Collaborative Emission Reduction Efforts in Urban Road Passenger Transportation: insights from the City Scale

Abstract

Road passenger transportation contributes significantly to carbon dioxide (CO2) and pollutant emissions, posing challenges for urban sustainability, particularly in rapidly urbanizing cities such as Fuzhou, which was recognized as a global sustainable development city for 2023. This study addresses the research gap by integrating road green factors, which refer to the ecological attributes of roads, such as green space, vegetation, and tree coverage that contribute to improving air quality and reducing pollution, into emission reduction strategies for city-scale road passenger transportation. This novel approach has not been extensively explored in the existing literature. The purpose of this study was to identify a rational pathway for emissions reduction by analyzing the economic, demographic, transportation infrastructure, road green space, and policy factor impacts on emissions. Employing a system dynamics (SD) model, this research evaluates the emissions from road passenger transportation in Fuzhou from 2010 to 2030 under various scenarios, including a baseline scenario (BS), controlled private cars travel demand (CPD), promotion of new energy vehicles (PVE), improvement in energy efficiency (IEE), increase in road capacity (IRC), and improvement in road green level (IRG). The principal results indicate that by optimizing the traffic structure and integrating other emission reduction measures, peak CO2 emissions can be achieved by 2024 under the three scenarios or by 2023 under the four scenarios. Furthermore, significant reductions in pollutants of 84.62% and 86.07% are projected, respectively. The study concluded that the economic benefits of CO2 emissions reductions consistently exceeded those of carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbon (HC), and nitrogen oxide (NOx) reductions, highlighting the importance of a holistic approach to emissions reduction strategies. Based on these findings, policy recommendations were proposed to guide the formulation of effective road passenger transportation policies aimed at achieving sustainable urban development.