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Future reductions of China’s transport emissions impacted by changing driving behaviour

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1228–1236 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

This paper examines what individual drivers can contribute to reduce global vehicle emissions in their daily driving. Here we analyse vehicle emissions from the behavioural perspective with the aim of identifying ways in which drivers can reduce emissions by modifying their driving behaviour. We propose an indicator, the Standardized Driver Aggressiveness Index, to estimate the changes in private vehicle driving behaviour and perform estimates based on the real-world vehicular trajectory data collected from 2013 to 2021 in China. We then develop a forward-looking integrated assessment model to predict the extra vehicle emissions that would be induced by various types of car-following behaviour, for example, calm, neutral and aggressive behaviour. Our results indicate that by 2050, the cumulative emissions linked to driving behaviour that could be prevented will amount to 400.5 million tons of CO2. Our findings highlight the importance of considering behavioural changes as part of the solution to mitigate transport emissions, and underline the urgent need for interventions that can lead drivers to adopting more sustainable driving behaviour.

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Fig. 1: Driving aggressiveness quantification and clustering results.
Fig. 2: Driver aggressiveness and corresponding driving behaviours.
Fig. 3: Correlation between SDAI and major pollutant emissions within a typical car-following response phase.
Fig. 4: Vehicle ownership, distribution, age and emission standards in China.
Fig. 5: Driver aggressiveness prediction and average single-time car-following response emissions.
Fig. 6: Prediction of pollutant and CO2 emissions during the car-following phase in China.

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Data availability

The 2013 and 2014 raw datasets are available on reasonable request to the authors due to third-party data usage restrictions during data collection, and the processed data used in the experiments are available in the following Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7978905 ref. 41. The 2018 dataset is publicly available from UTE Project by Southeast University, which can be downloaded from the following website: http://seutraffic.com. The 2021 dataset is publicly available from TJRD TS Project by Tongji University, which can be downloaded from the following website: https://tjrdts.com.

Code availability

The code for accumulated vehicle emissions estimation is available at the following Zenodo repository: https://zenodo.org/record/7978905 ref. 41.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72288101) (Z.G.) and (72171210) (X.C.), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M702819) (Y.X.), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LZ23E080002) (X.C.), National Key Research and Development Program of China (2020AAA0107400) (X.C.) and the Smart Urban Future (SURF) Laboratory, Zhejiang Province (X.C.).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Yingji Xia, Chenlei Liao.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Intelligent Transportation Systems, College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Yingji Xia, Chenlei Liao, Xiqun (Michael) Chen, Zheng Zhu, Xiaorui Chen & Lixing Wang

  2. Zhejiang University/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (ZJU-UIUC) Institute, Zhejiang University, Haining, China

    Xiqun (Michael) Chen

  3. School of Systems Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

    Rui Jiang & Ziyou Gao

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London, UK

    Marc E. J. Stettler & Panagiotis Angeloudis

Authors
  1. Yingji Xia
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Contributions

Y.X., C.L., X.(M.)C. and Z.Z. proposed the question. X.C. and L.W. designed and conducted the experiments. Y.X., R.J., Z.G. and X.(M.)C. developed the algorithms. Y.X., X.(M.)C., M.E.J.S. and P.A. wrote the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xiqun (Michael) Chen or Ziyou Gao.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Yao-Jan Wu and Ruimin Li for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–10, Tables 1–18, Notes 1 and 2 and references.

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Xia, Y., Liao, C., Chen, X.(. et al. Future reductions of China’s transport emissions impacted by changing driving behaviour. Nat Sustain 6, 1228–1236 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01173-x

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