Sun-to-Heel Energy Efficiency of Transportation Fuels

摘要

Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a technique to assess the environmental impact of a product or service throughout its life cycle and is used commonly to evaluate transport decisions at the planning level. Well-to-Wheel (WtW) is a subset of LCA that focuses on the efficiency of transport fuels by measuring fuel usage, greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants for a given pathway from the oil wells to the wheels of a vehicle being studied. The method has been commonly used to evaluate environmentally-friendly transport projects or applications. However, such methods do not consider the first and last mile connection and hence could not be adopted for planning-related transport applications (for example, transit-oriented development). This paper proposes a new approach of LCA - sun-to-heel (StH) method of LCA where a holistic system wide perspective based on trips, including first and last mile connections are considered during the environmental impact assessment of a transport product or service. Using secondary data collected from various transport applications, it can be shown that the StH method is a much more comprehensive approach in evaluating environmental impact of transit-friendly transportation innovations as compared to the WtW method.