Scenario-Based Carbon Footprint Inventory Tool for Urban Sustainable Development Decision Support: The Cincinnati Case Study

Rapidly growing travel demand and relevant transportation activities accompanied with land use changes resulted in tremendous traffic congestion and generated significant negative impacts on the environment, energy consumption and green house gas (GHG) emissions. However, the challenge lies in quantifying and assessing the carbon footprint that contributed by above interactive of land use changes, traffic operations and related emissions. The worst case scenario may be identified by analyzing insightful interactions between travel demand due to adaptive changes in land use and social economy and the impact of transportation activities on road emission and air quality. This paper presents a framework to fill in the gap through developing Geographical Information System (GIS)-based integrated analysis software, Synthetic Urban Scenario-based Traffic-related Air Impact aNalysis (Air-SUSTAIN) system, housed in the Scenario-Based Planning Support System (SB-PSS) system. This Air-SUSTAIN system is established using an integrated approach, i.e., categorized models, namely, travel forecasting model, vehicle emission model, and vehicle powered energy consumption model, are integrated heuristically and mathematically with data flows via input/output (I/O) interfaces. Thru the case study in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, it has shown that it is a powerful tool to provide decision makers with strong supporting scientific data and scenario results. The results from the case study also shows that by using incentive based planning policy- infill development, the region can achieve up to 13% carbon emission reductions comparing to the baseline. Thru the sustainability quantization analysis, the developed software tool Air-SUSTAIN is proven to be an effective tool in decision making for the improvement of quality of life for residents, water resource and infrastructure adaptation, etc.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40 Transportation Demand Forecasting. Alternate title: Scenario-Based Carbon Footprint Inventory Tool for Urban Sustainable Development Decision Support: Cincinnati Case Study
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Yao, Zhuo
    • Wei, Heng
    • Wang, Xinhao
    • Hao, Liu
    • Yang, Jeffery Y
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2014

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 19p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01515248
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 14-3242
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Feb 21 2014 3:18PM