Scenario-based Carbon Footprint Inventory Tool for Urban Sustainable Development Decision Support: The Cincinnati Case Study

摘要

Rapidly growing travel demand and relevant transportation activities accompanied with land use changes resulted in tremendous traffic congestion and generated significant negative impacts on the environment, energy consumption and green house gas (GHG) emissions. However, the challenge lies in quantifying and assessing the carbon footprint that contributed by above interactive of land use changes, traffic operations and related emissions. This paper presents a transferable framework to fill in the gap through developing Geographical Information System (GIS)-based integrated analysis software, Synthetic Urban Scenario-based Traffic-related Air Impact aNalysis (Air-SUSTAIN) system, housed in the Scenario-Based Planning Support System (SB-PSS) system. This Air-SUSTAIN system is established using an integrated approach, i.e., land use change model, travel demand forecasting model, vehicle emission model, are integrated heuristically and mathematically with data flows via input/output (I/O) interfaces. Thru the case study in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, it has shown that it is a powerful tool to provide decision makers with strong supporting scientific data and scenario results. The results from the case study also shows that by using incentive based planning policy- infill development, the region can achieve up to 13% carbon emission reductions comparing to the baseline. Thru the sustainability quantization analysis, the developed software tool Air-SUSTAIN is proven to be an effective tool in decision making for the improvement of quality of life for residents, water resource and infrastructure adaptation, etc.