[sustran] Estimating CO2 impacts of transport innovations and changes

[Eric Britton (Fr)]

Either you take climate modification seriously or you don’t. It’s a choice.
Mine is not only to take it very seriously in my work and personal life
choices, but also to do what I can to make it a major motor to advance the
New Mobility Agenda and more generally the challenge of “Reinventing
transport in cities”.

In this context I have been thinking of late about the hard task we face
when it comes to trying to measure or even rough estimating CO2 changes when
it comes to understanding the impacts of innovations and policy changes in
transport in cities.  This is by and large uncharted new terrain for most
transport planners and policy makers.

As you know, it’s a real head breaker when it comes to trying to calculate
the “CO2” impact of innovations in our sector, as much as anything because
of  the “million tailpipes” aspects of our stuff, which distinguishes it
considerably from what you get when you set out to measure pollution
abatement in a fixed source, such as a building, power plant, what have you.

When it comes to the soggy mess of measuring emissions impacts in our
sector, there are basically three ways to go.

1.	You can either measure at source (for example the tailpipe of a taxi or
bus retrofitted with a new engine/fuel gadget),  That’s pretty
straight-forward, and once you have that number you can then make your
calculations which bring in such shaping variables as maintenance, mileage,
etc. and then you get a fairly hard number before you. That can be pretty
satisfying.

2.	But when you start looking city-wide impacts of transport changes more
generally, you have basically two choices. Either you can try to measure the
various forms of pollution/change through monitoring devices salted over the
city (which brings up a whole range of complications that need to be sorted
out).

3.	Or alternatively, you can take a stab at measurement by finding out how
to guestimate the change brought about by your new policy or measure in
terms of its impact the number of vehicles on the road and their behavior
(subsequent to which you then have to jiggle the traffic count estimates
with various formula that you concoct to link these changes to C02
production.).

(For the record, when I use the term CO2 here I intend it as a shorthand for
all the airborne pollutants that get cranked out as a result of a vehicle
pushing its way through the environment. That really covers green-house
gases of all ilks, particulates, etc. What I like about “CO2” is that it is
short to write and read and does a fair job of conjuring up the rest. As
long as we do not interpret it too literally).

Anyway, I am preparing a short thinkpiece on this for our “Reinventing
transport in cities” series in process (see
http://www.climate.newmobility.org), and I hope too that it may serve you
and your colleagues. So there are my three quick questions to you this
morning.

1.	Do you have any references on this which I might see and learn from?


2.	Is anyone out there interested to receive copies of the piece when I
complete it? And finally,


3.	Anyone sufficiently interested that they might be willing to receive an
advanced draft for comment?

I do hope this will be useful.

Eric Britton



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