Some Solutions to Reduce Emissions from Transport Lie outside Our Cities – Case Study of India

Sudhir Gota

Developing countries are at a crossroads as current decisions and investments in the transport sector are set to lock-in GHG (CO₂) and air pollutant emissions for the next decades. There is reason for concern as sustainable transport policies that incorporate air quality and climate change are being developed and implemented at a slow pace, risking irreversible damage to the environment and people’s welfare. This is further aggravated by the global economic recession, which has lead to economic stimulus packages in developed countries for roads, the automotive industry, and related transport infrastructure. If developing countries follow this lead by prioritizing vehicles instead of people, it is certain that CO₂ emissions, air pollution, congestion, and other transport related problems will worsen.

It has been analyzed that, based on a business-as-usual scenario for motorization in India, the main trends from 2005 to 2025 are:

· The number of total vehicles would grow at 8.70% per year, an increase from 49 million to 246 million between 2005 and 2025.

· CO₂ emissions from road transport would increase at 7.75% per year, which is higher than many other Asian countries, from 203 million tons in 2005 to 905 million tons by 2025. Passenger transport represents 45% and freight transport represents 55% of total CO₂ emissions from road transport in 2005; this ratio would remain approximately the same in 2025.

· PM emissions from road transport would decline until 2025 by 1.88% per year due to the adoption of stricter fuel and vehicle emission standards, while NO_x emissions would increase at a rate of 2.37% per year. However, PM emissions would subsequently rise again due to the continued rapid vehicle growth, especially if emissions standards are not further tightened (Euro IV and above).

· Only about 22% of total CO₂ emissions from land passenger transport in India are attributed to intracity movement in these 29 cities. It is probable that the remaining 78% of CO₂ emissions come from other 498 cities (India has a total of 527 cities with over 100,000 people but limited data are available) and movement of passengers and freight from one city to another (intercity transport).

• If the current city trip mode share is retained, CO₂ emissions would increase 2- or 3-fold between 2008 and 2025, due to a rapid growth in urban population and in the number of trips.
• If the cities are able to increase the current non-motorized transport (NMT) and public transport trip shares by 5% each with a reduction in motorized transport share, the CO₂ emissions in 2008 would reduce by 9.16% and 6.21%.

A simple sketch analysis of intercity transport contribution to India’s total CO₂ emissions from road transport indicates that a 442 km stretch of 4-lane national highway may approximately correspond to the total passenger transport emissions from intracity movement in Bangalore. Similarly, CO₂ emissions from intracity passenger transport in Delhi are comparable to a 772 km stretch of highway.

The high emission from traffic in National Highways needs to be tackled by the government to reduce the environmental impact. The reason for relatively high emissions from national highways is that freight transport dominates the highways (52% of the vehicle mode share) whereas 2- and 3-wheelers are more present on typical urban roads (about 40% of vehicle mode share). Because 2- and 3-wheelers are more fuel efficient and emit less CO2 than larger vehicles, emissions from urban road transport are relatively lower compared to highways. A second reason could be high empty truck movements due to inefficiencies in freight logistics. Nearly 88% of the truck fleet is under unorganized operators.

Key recommendations for government and stakeholders are as follows:

1. Policies and projects should have a stronger focus on making cities livable and accessible for people, rather than on just improving the flow of vehicles in cities, by integrating transport demand management (i.e. reducing the number of trips made and distances traveled), public transport, and non-motorized transport into urban development and transport policies.
2. Policies and projects should aim to reduce CO₂ and air pollutant emissions from the outset, thus creating a low carbon and emission transport system, rather than adding emission mitigating measures to transport policies and projects after they have been designed. Land use and urban planning is critical in influencing transport demand and behavior thereby reducing the emissions thus improving the health.
3. Indian cities are not maximizing the density influence to reduce the emissions. Many cities which are dense are showing high emissions because of insufficient public transport and high influx of private vehicles. Many Transit oriented development initiatives are being taken by city governments, but much remains to be done on land use-transport-environment integration.
4. The National Highways carry a huge amount of traffic. Considering high emissions from road based mode of transportation, the government needs to revise feasibility and environmental impact assessment (EIA) guidelines to include emission quantification and mitigation measures in the selection of projects.
5. Urgent attention is needed for freight transport, which currently contributes to 55% of road transport CO₂ emissions. Most freight vehicles use diesel fuel which contributes to relatively high PM emissions and black carbon (“soot”), which in addition to being an air pollutant is considered a major contributor to global warming. Both urban transport and freight transport should receive equal attention.

India Transport Emissions – 2007 – Quantifying emissions without reliable data

Sudhir Gota

You simply cannot generate reliable emission estimates without accurate data. In fact, I would not hesitate to claim that “Without reliable data, transport emissions forecasting is as good as “fortune telling””. You need to consider the numbers with a pinch of salt or many a times consider the estimates as only numbers!

The reason why I am coming up with such an argument is because yesterday India released its 2007 Green House Gas inventory. I think it has some big problems with the transport estimates. It claims that the “road transport sector emitted 123.55 million tons of CO2e, which is 87% of the total emissions from the transport sector”. The transport sector emissions include all GHG emissions from road transport, railways, aviation and navigation. It suggests that “the total number of registered vehicles in the country has increased from 5.4 million in 1981 to 99.6 million in 2007. Two wheelers and cars constitute nearly 88% of the total vehicles at the national level”.

The problem with the total numbers of vehicles in India is that registered vehicles cannot be used for estimates as we don’t have active scrappage/renewal system. Not many people have an idea as to how to guess the number of vehicles on road. Even the activity information (vehicle travel/year in km) is not available on public domain and often people borrow the numbers from some isolated studies and from other countries or other researchers.

In order to highlight the data issues, following are some of the critical issues

1. Vehicles

a. No breakdown by mode type and engine technology (e.g. Euro 1 or Euro 2 compliant, etc.)

b. limited data on active vehicle fleet

c. No data on splitting small cars with big cars, MUV’s, LCV’s

d. Isolated surveys to determine age of the vehicles

2. Fuels

a. No fuel split available - gasoline, diesel, alternative fuel

3. Activity

a. No data on urban vs rural share of movement

b. Occupancy – how many people/load

c. Annual surveys and proper methodologies on vehicle-km travelled, passenger-km travelled, and tonnes-km rarely exist

d. Reasonable data on fuel consumption per km travelled on various transport modes. This issue is critical as quoted values from lab testing differs from actual on road values

4. Emission factors

a. lack of locally representative emission factors for existing vehicle fleet

Coming back on the India’s 2007 estimate of 123 million tons in 2007 for an activity information of 99 million vehicles is too low as seen from the below graphic. In fact the estimates of CO₂ /vehicles is lesser (1.2) than what researchers have quantified for passenger transport (ratio of 1.5 for passenger vehicles. Including commercial vehicles in estimation would expand this figure to a range of 2 to 4).

Strangely, the same authors, in an earlier study had quantified 106 million tons in 2000 with 48 million vehicles. Then why is that the doubling of vehicle numbers not showing impact?

One thing that hits hard in the below graphic is the huge variation of CO₂ and vehicles. It seems that researchers do not agree with each other … a classic case of elephant and the blind men !!

CO2 EMISSIONS FROM RAILWAYS – USE OF EMISSION FACTORS

Sudhir Gota

Quantifying emissions from Railways (including LRT/MRT) is really tricky. Some of the variables which often trouble analysts are – use of construction, technology and occupancy factors which can make or break an analysis. Last year, Mikhail Chester brought forward a very interesting analysis on complete carbon footprint of transport modes and this study was critically accepted. The study provided a comprehensive environmental life-cycle assessment of not only vehicle and fuel components but also infrastructure components for automobiles, buses, commuter rail systems and aircraft. Many processes were included for vehicles (manufacturing, active operation, inactive operation, maintenance, insurance), infrastructure (construction, operation, maintenance, parking, insurance), and fuels (production, distribution). The vehicles inventoried in the study were sedans, pickups, SUVs, urban diesel buses, light rail, heavy rail and aircraft.

The important argument made by Chester was that one needs to closely look at the occupancy of Rails and its built infrastructure which often tip the scales. But, more often researchers think that one can always borrow the emission factors from different sources and this would provide some estimates of reasonable accuracy. This is a myth.

In order to demolish the argument of usage of common emission factor, we summarize many of the emission factors [1]available online. The data collation was further helped by inputs from ADB-TA - Reducing Carbon Emissions from Transport Projects.

It is to be noted that emission factors have been quantified using different methodologies with different boundaries. What sets them apart is the huge variation. The variation is between 16 to 1200 g/pkm. The Asian MRT’s which have very high occupancy ratios have values between 20 to 110 g/pkm. Segregating heavy rails, MRT and LRT may help in refining this further. However, it is to be noted that emission factors cannot be constant but dynamic with time in order to reflect changes in design, occupancy and other factors.

Thus, one cannot borrow the emission factor straight away. What one should do is to measure the fuel/electricity consumption to derive emissions. There is no easy way out.

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[1] Please send us a request in case you would like to access the sources.

Cartoons as a Mass Communication Strategy for Sustainable Transport

Sudhir Gota

The first thing most of us often notice in the newspaper is the editorial cartoon – an art of the moment drawn to illustrate message in a comic way. The illustrations often reside in our memory for a long time and thus newspapers use cartoons as a means to provide the knockout punch – to create an immediate impact among the audience.

This benefit of quick impact provides huge potential for educating masses on sustainable transport issues. To initiate the paradigm shift, a huge effort needs to be made in changing the mindset of transport consumers and policy makers. Cartoons in newspapers can provide the not only an easiest way of reaching vast segment of audience– educated to non-educated, children to elders, urban and rural people etc., but also creating lasting impact in few seconds.

When editorial cartoons are supported by think pieces written by editors, policy makers and experts, it creates the momentum at the grass route level thereby increasing the support for the paradigm shift in transport. One needs all the support when trying to create solutions by attacking the demand and breaking the trend of using infrastructure as a magic bullet.

Take the case of Ahmedabad BRTS, where media played a constructive role in highlighting various issues related to BRTS, educating the people and providing constructive criticisms which enabled it to become a best practice BRT in Asia. Without media support, things become very difficult for policy makers and political support for radical actions often evaporates.

In order to capture as to how newspaper cartoons can create lasting impact, transport cartoons from times of India newspaper (TOI) from India where collated from the period January-2008 till now. This newspaper is extremely popular in India and supposed to have the largest circulation among all English-language newspapers in the world. According to some estimates it has a print readership of 13.3 million and its online version reaching a record 159 million page views in May 2009. Scanning through 840 newspaper editions though is a time consuming process, extracted collection is very impressive with many transport related stories being told with simple images.

Studying the cartoons from last early 2008, fuel prices and congestion has been the favorite topic of the artists. In 2008, newspapers used cartoons many a times to create awareness on fuel consumption and rising fuel prices. Climate change and COP discussion was another favorite topic during 2009. Many cartoons were localized to suit domestic audience to create greater impact and many also relied on quotes to add the punch. The stories were conveyed from the perspective of common man.
Though, few cartoons took potshots against Delhi BRT, many were highlighting the poor pedestrian infrastructure. Surprisingly, considering very high accident fatalities, not many cartoons highlighted the road safety aspects.

Please find some of the collection below. Please source all the cartoons to Times of India and do send them positive feedback and request for more transport related cartoons @http://epaper.timesofindia.com/index.asp. Many a times such efforts can create lasting impression and thus resulting in better outreach.

See the cartoons @ http://cleanairinitiative.org/portal/system/files/Times_of_India.pptx

FREIGHT TRANSPORT – THE MISSING LINK

Sudhir Gota

Will more trucks on more roads yield higher GDP?

Under the changing climate many cities are initiating several city based passenger transport strategies to combat growing externalities from transport. When we hear interviews, read papers – we often see policy makers charting down the magic bullets to solve the negative spillovers from transport and most often they overlook one vital clog in the wheel – freight transport.

In Asian countries, trucks are the most visible freight carriers with mini vans playing significant roles within cities. The truck-freight growth often shadows GDP growth rates thus making policy makers assume that more trucks on road would invariably mean spiraling increase in GDP. More often this is misapprehension.

Though trucks offer highest flexibility, increase in trucks means high rebound congestion with each additional truck slowing down others and thus ensuring that that we are moving our freight while accelerating the consumption of valuable resources. In order to keep the movement easy on the pocket we often subsidize diesel with devastating consequences.

The other misapprehension floating in the market which many agencies quote is

“Equipment utilization rates for the trucking fleet, which average 60,000 km to 100.000 km per truck-year, are less than a quarter o f those in developed economies”

This is used as a basis for expanding roads without realizing the fact that average trucks in developed countries cover the same distances.

In order to understand the importance of trucks on environment and transport, let’s consider the case of China;

“Diesel vehicles (majority freight) constitute only 12% of total fleet in 2005. Since they are commercially operated, they travel length and breadth of the country accumulating mileages. This increases the share of diesel in total vehicle kilometer travel to nearly 29%. Since the trucks operate at low economy and efficiency, the share of diesel vehicle in total CO2 jumps to 72% and in PM emissions to 91%!!”

Or Thailand

“The share of total energy consumption is 51% for the freight transport mode, 32% for the nonurban passenger transport mode and 17% for the urban transport mode”

Or India

“Unfortunately the rail road mode share competition does not replicate zeno’s paradox. In 1950’s the rail-road ton-km share was 90%-10%. In 2000 it is 27%-73%. Volume in both the sectors show positive growth but rail represents slow growth, road represents high. With government doubling the investments on super highways roads would continue to attract more freight in future.

It’s clear that the freight contribution in transport is huge and thus provides the most opportunities. There are many reasons for the inefficiency in the Asian logistics sector, prime being fragmented market.

Majority of trucking industry is divided with multiple operators. Consider China, where majority oftrucking companies have on average around one truck and fewer than two employees. A decade earlier, India had 77% of fleet under operators owning 5 trucks or less and now 86% of total fleet is still under unorganized operators.

With no coordination this leads to high deadheading. In fact in many Asian countries deadheading amounts to nearly 30-40% of total truck VKT. There are ripple effects of such deadheading. In order to maximize the loaded movements, the operators have to resort to overloading which not only aggravates the injury to the road pavement but also consumes high energy. More often due to overloading, in order to silence the authorities, the truck drivers pay a huge bribe.

Having small operators’ to dominate the field mean that the vehicles being used to transport freight are not only old but also are size in-efficient. In fact the ratios in China and India are approximately 1:1 of truck trailers to truck tractors. This ratio is often 2-3 : 1 in developed countries. The impact of such inefficient vehicle fleet does not only pinch the pockets of operator but also the tax payers as higher axle loading of 2-3 axle trucks damages the road thus requiring frequent strengthening.

The pavement damages by overloaded trucks not only pinches the taxpayers’ pockets but also chokes the lungs and damages the environment as more often it disturbs the balance in speeds – first effect being reduction in average speeds to less than 20 kmph to tackle poor roads, the authorities starts slowly rebuilding the roads thus draining the resources and environment further and as soon as the roads are finished it increases the speeds beyond normal or beyond the limit where one can save energy thus increasing the fuel consumption.

It’s no surprise that authorities are changing the codes fast. Over the past decades many countries have increased the legal axle limits to accommodate such higher axle loads. India’s legal single axle load limit is now 10.2 tons, which used to be 8.16 tons decade earlier. Thailand’s maximum axle load limit is 8.2 tonnes while the truck-load limit is 25 tonnes, which was increased from 21 tonnes in 2006.

The impact of thicker pavement and overloading on environment is so complex that it is a detailed study topic inUC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport where many people are researching on it.

In the urban environment, the impact needs to be understood from the perspectives of traffic management and air pollution. Cities build bypasses after bypasses to push the trucks out of city limits which boomerangs with disastrous consequences because of sprawl and city freight distribution. In a city like Tianjin (China), trucks contribute 44% of PM and 54% of NOx emissions.

Consider the case of Delhi, experts here used the traffic management option commonly adopted in Asia i.e. to ban truck movement in daytime. Though this initially reduced the PM levels during the daytime, however, due to the rapid growth in truck numbers during the night time, the contribution of trucks to day-time PM levels is increasing as night time emissions linger into the daytime.

The problem is further compounded when there are multiple agencies having stakes in freight movement. One of the studies from Philippines listed down 41 agencies/organizations/institutions which needs to be brought together to discuss solutions.

Clearly, the magnitude of issues dictate urgent actions.

Wait for the next blog for solutions...

Transport Infrastructure Efficiency

Which kind of transport investments are the most efficient?

Sudhir Gota

This question bothers many policy makers. Answering this question is rather difficult as different projects require different scale of investments which carry variable load and satisfies diverse set of consumers. Also it would be wrong to assume that we can always build different alternatives physically having same bunch of people using it.

Knowing the above limitations, we can still assess efficiency of infrastructure requiring different set of investments – from High Cost such as Metro, to median ranged projects such as BRTS, Roads to low cost projects such as bikelanes and footpaths.

Let’s consider the following projects – Metro, BRTS, Expressway of 4 lane, two lane urban in high income zone, two lane urban in Low income zone, Bikeways and Footpaths and thus using the law of averages to evaluate the construction cost efficiency.

In order to compare efficiency – one needs average capacity and average cost. Let’s make an assumption as detailed in below table.

	Capacity (average person/hour)	Cost (million USD)
1 km of Footpath of 2m wide	2400	0.1
1 km of Bikeways of 3m wide	3000	0.15
1km of two lane urban (Low income)	4500	1
1km of two lane urban (high income)	2600	1
1 km of Expressway of 4 lane	8500	3.5
1 km of BRTS	16000	2
1 km of Metro	60000	35

1. The Metro represented here is a replica of Bangalore Metro being constructed now. Its estimated to cost 35 million USD/Km.

2. BRTS – The BRTS taken above satisfies 8000 pphpd and costs 2 million USD/Km. this represents an average BRTS which is being constructed in many Asian cities.

3. Roads are tricky as they can carry a highly variable set of volume. So let’s assume LOS “B” and and 7% as peak hour volume. Lets also assume that a freight vehicle is equivalent to a vehicle carrying 15 passengers. ( this thumb rule matches with Value of time concept)

a. consider 35000 PCU/Day for Expressway – 4 lane

b. consider 15000 PCU/day for 2 lane urban road

c. Occupancy of 1,2,1.5 and 25 for two, three wheeler, car and Bus

d. Assume 50% mode share of freight in expressway and 9% in urban roads ( data Indian Roads)

e. Assume 55% two wheelers in low income and 55% Cars in high income areas

f. The other mode share epitomizes typical Asian roads ( 6% of vehicles as Bus)

4. Use Passenger Car Units to convert PCU’s into vehicles and then using occupancies break down the vehicles into passengers

5. Consider Bikelanes to carry 3000 cyclists/hour suggesting a dense network as seen in Delhi BRTS costing 0.15 million USD/km

6. Consider footpaths to carry 2400 persons/hour at a speed of 1.2 m/sec indicating LOS B. It may cost approx ) 1million USD/km.

Using the same money as required for constructing 1 km metro, one can on an average construct

1. 18 km of BRTS
2. 10 km of four lane Expressway
3. 35 km of two lane urban road
4. 235 km of Bikeways
5. 350 km of footpaths

Thus normalizing different projects into same investment of say 1 km of metro and thus using the capacities and length, we can calculate efficiencies.

The below graph gives the efficiencies

The low cost projects such as bikeways and footpaths in fact provide best efficiency!!

They are 12 to 14 times more efficient than a system like metro. The above calculations can be made more useful by including operation costs and emissions. But the footpaths and bikelanes would be the winners but they often receive least attention and funding.