Utilization of Urban Form Information for Extracting Commuting Travel Carbon Emission on Urban Road Network

Summary form only given. With the rapid urbanization of developing country, the harm effect to environment of urban carbon emission in traffic has attracted wide attention, under the background of global climate change. The widely used methods, such as remote sensing and monitor station, are unable to get carbon emission on urban road network accurately, due to poor spatial resolution and coverage. In this context, the article discusses the method to extract carbon emission of commuting using urban form information. The research uses the TRANUS integrated land use and transport model to simulate commuting traffic flow on road network. Urban form information is used as input parameter, then transformed into residents´ travel requirement, and finally into traffic flow covered all road network. The urban form information includes land use, population, income, block size, potential traffic mode, land price, traffic facilities et al. The spatial distribution of carbon emission on road network is derived from traffic flow information, using the standard car emission factors from IPCC. This paper takes Xiamen Island as study area, simulates residents´ commuting travel during rush hour of an ordinary workday. By comparison with 11 sample point data of actual traffic monitor stations, accuracy evaluation shows that system error of traffic flow simulation is 6.56%, and relative mean error is 18.43%. The spatial distribution of commuting travel carbon emission shows variability on different road sections. Carbon emission on most road sections is less than 1.0 tCO₂e/km, some sections is higher than 6.0 tCO₂e/km which mainly distribute on central and north part of the island. The urban form information is showed connection to the characteristics of carbon emission. The result shows that higher income people have a higher total carbon emission and emission intensity. Emission intensity of high income people on Xiamen Island is nearly 30 times than that of- low income people. Private cars totally emit 94.17 tCO₂e during rush hour, comparing to the emission of public transportation is 22.23 tCO₂e. Within all public transport forms, bus, BRT and TAXI take up about 38.1%, 3.45% and 58.45% separately. However, the emission intensity of TAXI highly exceeds the other two modes. This study is expected to find an effective method to evaluate the carbon emission with spatial details, and we hope that it can help people to construct a low-carbon city.