Transportation Research Part D-transport and Environment最新文献

Improving urban dwellers quality of life requires mitigating traffic congestion, minimizing waiting delays, and reducing fuel wastage and associated toxic air pollutants. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) are envisioned as the best option, thanks to zero exhaust emissions and regenerative braking. BEVs can be human-driven or autonomous and will co-exist with internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) for years. BEVs can help at complex intersections where traffic is saturated. However, their benefits can be reduced by poor intersection management (IM) strategies that coordinate mixed traffic configurations inefficiently. This paper studies energy savings and emissions reduction using BEVs mixed with human-driven ICEVs under eight relevant IM approaches. It shows that adding BEVs has impacts on throughput, energy consumption, waiting delays, and tail-pipe emissions that depend on the specific IM approach used. Thus, this study provides the information needed to support an optimal choice of IM approaches considering the emerging trend towards electrical mobility.

This study compared 11 global climate models (GCMs) in assessing the variability of predicted pavement performance in 24 cities in the U.S. under 1.5 °C global warming and presented equations to estimate the impacts of global warming on pavement performance more simply. The results show a spread among GCMs regarding their predicted pavement deterioration with some models resulting in higher deterioration values than others. Thermal cracking, fatigue cracking, total rutting, and international roughness index (IRI) for the investigated 24 cities in the U.S. are found to increase by 124 ft/mi (23.11 m/km), 24 %, 4.6 %, and 1 % on average under 1.5 °C global warming comparatively to the baseline scenario (1991–2010). Regardless of GCMs, the results reveal southern U.S. cities are expected to suffer from greater changes in IRI and thermal cracking, while global warming induced rutting and fatigue cracking will be of greater concern in northern cities than in southern cities.

Although not without criticism, carbon pricing has been identified as a key instrument to support the energy transition process, as it can convey the signal of the actual cost of carbon in relative prices. However, when price and tax elasticities are considered separately, the international literature has shown that energy demand may be more sensitive to changes in tax rates. We estimate gasoline and diesel demand elasticities for Italian households using a dynamic model on a custom-built pseudo-panel. Our results confirm that household demand for transport fuels is more sensitive to the tax component than to the oil price, controlling for income level, age and cohort effects. These results have important implications for the potential effectiveness of transport fuel taxation in setting the decarbonisation pathway: a lower tax rate is required to achieve the target than that assumed on the basis of gross price elasticities.

This paper identifies regulatory requirements as primary drivers for participation in domestic ETSs, supported by common values and reputation considerations. This extends the theory of institutional entrepreneurship by demonstrating how regulatory frameworks can incentivize corporate actors to adopt sustainable practices. It highlights the critical role of regulatory environments in shaping institutional entrepreneurship, suggesting that stringent regulations can effectively drive organizations toward sustainability. This perceived normative and cognitive pressure aligns with Levy and Kolk (2002), which suggests that climate strategies are formulated by managers from countries where such environmental practices are strictly required (Pinkse, 2007). Compared with previous studies, this paper reveals that collective institutional entrepreneurship can create opportunities for integrating sustainability policies under favorable conditions. Unlike Jolly et al. (2016), who highlighted the isolated and contested actions of individual actors, this study shows that sustainability policies and developments by legacy aviation groups often overlap at both micro (individual) and meso (organizational or institutional) levels. This intersection of corporate values with individual passengers, other subsidiary airlines and international community expectations underscores a collective institutional entrepreneurship that fosters integrated sustainability policies under favorable conditions.

Wildlife roadkills have emerged as one of the most adverse impacts of road networks on biodiversity. Knowledge regarding amphibian roadkill patterns in Asian tropical rainforests is limited. Herein, we present the first assessment of roadkill patterns of amphibians in the Hainan tropical rainforest of southern China, based on extensive field surveys covering 58 road transects in 2021 and 2022. We investigated the effects of species characteristics, seasons, and environmental factors on amphibian roadkill patterns. We recorded 503 amphibian carcasses and identified 13 amphibian species. Abundant species are more likely to be killed. There were no significant differences in the roadkill observations between the dry and wet seasons. The number of roadkill observations correlated positively with the percentage of area with buildings. Our findings provide new insights into the ecological effects of roads and transportation in Asian tropical rainforests, which will help design and implement conservation actions. We suggest prioritizing permanent mitigation measures to reduce roadkill risk for abundant species on roads with a relatively high percentage of area with buildings in the Hainan tropical rainforest.

This study investigates the influence of fellow passenger interactions on travel satisfaction and wellbeing among commuters with disabilities (CWD) in a developing country. Employing qualitative methods such as ethnography and interviews, it explores the challenges CWD faces in public transport. In addition to building on previous studies regarding interaction on public transport, the study introduces the concept of Commuter-to-Commuter interaction. This study unveils the impact of fellow passengers on travel experiences and categorises interactions as positive, neutral, or negative, elucidating key features of this dynamic. Understanding these interactions is pivotal for developing interventions aimed at improving transportation accessibility. Unlike previous studies focusing on religion, race, gender, and age, this research addresses a gap by focusing on disabilities. Enhancing comprehension of inclusion dynamics informs policies for more equitable transportation systems, ultimately contributing to a supportive and accommodating environments for all commuters, including those with disabilities.

The real-driving emission (RDE) test was employed involving a conventional compressed natural gas (CNG) bus and its hybrid counterpart powered by the same engine type along the same route. By calculating the energy balance of engine and vehicle, hybrid bus saves energy in three ways: engine efficiency increase (30 %), regenerative braking (21 %) and without idling (7 %). But the higher curb weight offset 32 % of the benefits, resulting in 24 % improvement in comprehensive efficiency. The NOx and particulate number (PN) emissions of the hybrid bus could be reduced by 46 % and 39 %, respectively. The emission causes of all pollutants were further classified into: cold-start, restart and hot running. Restart accounts for 52 % of CO emission and hot running for 55 % of NOx emission. Frequent engine restart and short engine running durations (<50 s) impair efficiency and emissions. The findings can help policymakers assess the environmental impact of transport electrification.

To realize the resourceful utilization of roadway waste for recycling and low-carbon construction, two environmental-friendly pavement technologies pertaining to cold recycled foamed asphalt mixture and crumb rubber asphalt (CRA) were combined to prepare foamed rubberized asphalt cold recycled mixture (FRA-CRM). The results indicate that pre-swelled activated crumb rubber (CR) by waste oil with foaming agent can enhance the foaming effect of CRA and reduce the manufacturing temperature by 15 °C, and it presents better fatigue resistance and low-temperature performance. Moreover, the moisture susceptibility, high-temperature rutting resistance, and low-temperature cracking resistance of FRA-CRM have been substantially ameliorated in comparison with traditional foamed matrix asphalt cold recycled mixture. Life cycle assessment analysis shows that compared with conventional hot mix CRA mixture, the production demand of FRA-CRM per 1 t contributes to approximate 45.13 % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and 51.38 % of energy saving.

Generally, when generating noise maps, the Weiler-Atherton algorithm is employed for polygon intersection calculations to estimate building obstruction attenuation. However, for larger areas, the computational efficiency of this method heavily depends on computational power and expensive hardware. To address these challenges, our method employs binary images to streamline the calculation of intersection area between the building polygon and the noise propagation path, thereby improving computational efficiency. The proposed method consists of two features: converting polygon shapefiles into binary images and subsequently applying the Bresenham Algorithm to calculate building occlusion attenuation. Our study demonstrated that this approach reduced the calculation time to 39.1 % of the original duration, with a mean absolute discrepancy between the two methods of 0.77 dB(A). By utilizing the proposed method to generate noise maps with comparable accuracy, our approach offers an attractive alternative that reduces hardware requirements.

Massive amounts of highly time-resolved and freely available flight tracking data are fed into a modelling tool previously devised by the authors, which was improved to perform optimal reconstruction of low-altitude aircraft operations and more accurate prediction of airport noise. The benefits of the high-resolution data, key novelty of this work, include easier flight operation identification, higher-quality ground track reconstruction, and an upgraded aircraft performance estimation. This is conducted with a new version of the authors’ mixed analysis-synthesis approach, where more degrees of freedom are added to the prescribed flight procedures and the aircraft take-off weight is estimated from the tracking data. The results obtained for Zurich Airport and 2022 traffic show the ability of the proposed approach to capture the actual flight procedures during departure and arrival operations, ultimately leading to a slight underestimation (1.7 dB(A) on average) of the exposure-based cumulative noise level in the airport area.