Urban Form, Daily Travel Behaviour and Transport CO2 Emission: Micro-level Analysis and Spatial Simulation

Developing low carbon cities is a key goal of 21st century planning, and one that can be supported by a better understanding of the factors that shape travel behaviour, and resulting carbon emissions. Understanding travel based carbon emissions in mega- cities is vital, but city size, and often a lack of required data, limits the ability to apply linked land use, transport and tactical transport models to investigate the impact of policy and planning interventions on travel and emissions. Using Beijing as a case study, this thesis develops a new bottom-up methodology to provide improved transport CO2 emission from people‟s daily urban travel in Beijing from 2000 to 2030. It combines spatial microsimulation approach from geography and activity travel research from the transport field and applies this in a developing country for a long period, where detailed data to undertake fine scale analysis of phenomena such as transport CO2 emissions generated by travel behaviour is very scarce.
On the basis of an activity diary survey and demographic data from the 2000 and 2010 population censuses, this research first employs spatial microsimulation to simulate a realistic synthetic populations‟ daily travel behaviour and estimate their transport CO2 emission at a fine geographical resolution (urban sub-district) between 2000 and 2010 for urban Beijing. It compares and analyses the changes in travel behaviour and transport CO2 emissions over this decade, and examines the role of socio-demographics and change in urban form in contributing to the modelled trend. The transport CO2 emission from people‟s daily travel behaviour in urban Beijing is then simulated and projected at disaggregate level to 2030 under four scenarios, to illustrate the utility of this bottom-up approach and modelling capability. The four scenarios (transport policy trend, land use and transport policy, urban compaction and vehicle technology, and combined policy) are developed to explore travel behaviour and transport CO2 emission under current and potential strategies on transport, urban development and vehicle technology. The results showed that, compared to the trend scenario, employing both transport and urban development policies could reduce total passenger CO2 emission to 2030 by 24%, and by 43% if all strategies were applied together. This research reveals the potential of microsimulation in emission estimation for large cities in developing countries where data availability may constrain more traditional approaches, and provides alternative urban development strategies and policy implications for CO2 emission mitigation targets set by the national and local governments.