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Better roads increases public transportation, causes more emissions


Strand, Arvid et al 09 (Næss, Petter; Tennøy, Aud) Institute of Transport Economics, Norway “Better Roads Increase Emissions” http://www.transportbusiness.net/content/view/436/3/

Transport infrastructure development, including road construction, has always had as its main purpose to facilitate easier transfer of commodities and skilled labor, thereby increasing the efficiency of and contributing to economic growth. Generating as much transport as possible is, however, not an objective in its own right. The challenges and problems associated with transport show that increasing transport volumes bring about undesirable impacts as well as benefits. The influence of road development on the amount of transport and the distribution between transport modes therefore relates to a discussion that has been going on for decades. The study on which this article is based was funded by the Norwegian Road Directorate who wanted us to shed light on the following main question: how does road construction influence on greenhouse gas emissions? We have elucidated this issue by addressing three sub-topics: whether, how and to what extent improved road standard influences greenhouse gas emissions 1) by reducing the emissions per vehicle km driven; 2) by stimulating growth in car traffic and thereby increasing greenhouse gas emissions; and 3) through the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from construction, operation and maintenance of the road network. The study concludes that the question of whether better roads contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions must be answered mainly negatively. In most cases, the construction of better roads leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, improved road quality facilitates faster driving, often at speed levels where faster driving causes emissions to increase considerably (above 80 km/h). Emissions also increase because people make on average more and longer trips, and because improved conditions for car travelling cause some previous trips by public or non-motorised modes of transport to be replaced by trips by car. Moreover, the road construction itself and the operation and maintenance of the expanded roads require energy use and thereby contribute to increase greenhouse gas emissions. These last components make up an increasing part of the emissions, the lower the traffic volumes are along the new or widened links.

Transportation infrastructure emits and facilitates emissions


Davis, Steven J. et al. (2010); Science 329, 1330 “Future CO2 Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure” Science (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published weekly, except the last week in December, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. Copyright 2010 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title Science is a registered trademark of AAAS.
If current greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations remain constant, the world would be committed to several centuries of increasing global mean temperatures and sea level rise (1–3). By contrast, near-elimination of anthropogenic CO2 emissions would be required to produce diminishing GHG concentrations consistent with stabilization of mean temperatures (4–6). Yet long-lived energy and transportation infrastructure now operating can be expected to contribute substantial CO2 emissions over the next 50 years [e.g., (7)]. Barring widespread retrofitting of existing power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies or the early decommissioning of serviceable infrastructure, these “committed emissions” represent infrastructural inertia, which may be the primary contributor to total future warming commitment.

Emissions scenarios such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rely on projected changes in population, economic growth, energy demand, and the carbon intensity of energy over time (8). Although these scenarios represent plausible future emissions trends, the infrastructural inertia of emissions at any point in time is not explicitly quantified. Here, we present scenarios reflecting direct emissions from existing energy and transportation infrastructure, along with climate model results showing the warming commitment of these emissions. With respect to GHG emissions, infrastructural inertia may be thought of as having two important and overlapping components: (i) infrastructure that directly releases GHGs to the atmosphere, and (ii) infrastructure that contributes to the continued production of devices that emit GHGs to the atmosphere. For example, the interstate highway and refueling infrastructure in the United States facilitates continued production of gasoline powered automobiles. Here, we focus only on the warming commitment from infrastructure that directly releases CO2 to the atmosphere. Essentially, we answer the following question: What if no additional CO2-emitting devices (e.g., power plants, motor vehicles) were built, but all the existing CO2-emitting devices were allowed to live out their normal lifetimes? What CO2 levels and global mean temperatures would we attain? Of course, the actual lifetime of devices may be strongly influenced by economic and policy constraints. For instance, a ban on new CO2-emitting devices would create tremendous incentive to prolong the lifetime of existing devices. Thus, our scenarios are not realistic, but they offer a means of gauging the threat of climate change from existing devices relative to those devices that have yet to be built.



Materials for construction emit large amounts of CO2


ADB, July 2010, Evaluation Knowledge Brief, “Reduction Carbon Emissions from Transport Projects” Asian Development Bank Reference Number: EKB: REG 2010-16 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/46/47170274.pdf
Table 1 shows the carbon emissions contributions by each transport mode. The initial estimate of the overall carbon footprint of ADB’s transport sector assistance approved between 2000 and 2009 is 792 million tons, covering both construction and operations emissions. This is the aggregate carbon footprint of 78,983 km of infrastructure development using ADB's assistance. To put this cumulative total of emissions into perspective, the set of ADB transport projects approved between 2000 and 2009 is estimated to account for 39.6 million tons of CO2 per year, which could be comparable to the annual land transport emissions of Thailand (44 million tons CO2 in 2005) (footnote 17). The quantum of emissions from ADB's transport projects is about 2% of the United States of America's (USA’s) annual transport emissions for 2008.33 Table 1 shows the relative intensity of the carbon footprint as well as the gross carbon emissions. Typically, ADB-funded projects tend to increase or rehabilitate the size of the transport infrastructure, e.g., an expressway project will increase the number of lanes of an existing two-lane highway to a four-lane expressway. The number of lanes has a significant impact on the total carbon footprint as it influences the demand, volume to capacity (V–C) ratios, speed, and construction emissions. The size of the construction emissions varies between 1.2% and 24.0% of total (construction + operations) emissions. This estimate is based on the quantity of three key construction materials used—cement, steel, and bitumen. Although in absolute terms the construction emissions of ADB-funded rural roads are low, they form about 24% of total emissions in this category since the operations emissions are also low. Construction emissions of ADB-funded railway projects are about 2.4% of total emissions in this category. Expressways account for over 60% of ADB’s transportation project-related emissions, 483 million tons, as nearly 22,000 lane-km of expressways were financed by ADB during the period, and these facilities generally produce a high level of CO2 per km. Railways account for most of the rest, about 32%, which is a function of the high tonnage of bulk and other freight carried per track-km of rail—this adds up to considerable energy use even if railways are considerably more energy-efficient per ton-km than trucks for freight haulage. Road rehabilitation projects on average have a small carbon footprint since they do little to induce new traffic, and they improve vehicle operating efficiency. Although these road rehabilitation projects formed 82% of the total km of transport facilities financed for construction or reconstruction by ADB during the past 10 years, they contributed to 4% of the CO2 footprint of ADB’s transport portfolio. Rural road capacity expansion projects typically have only a modest carbon footprint, and these projects made up 4% of the km of transport facilities improved by ADB during the period, so overall emissions from these were also small. ADB had only marginal investments in other types of transport facilities—BRT, MRT, and nonmotorized facilities—during 2000–2009.



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