Hyunsu Choi, Dai Nakagawa, Ryoji Matsunaka, Tetsuharu Oba and Jongjin Yoon
International Journal of Railway, vol. 6, no. 2, pp.33-44, 2013

Abstract : In recent years, energy consumption in the transportation sector by expanding motorization continues to increase in almost every country in the world. Moreover, the growth rate of the transportation energy consumption is significantly higher than those of the civilian and industrial sectors. Therefore, every country strives to reduce its dependence on private transport, which is the main contributor to the transportation energy consumption. In many countries, concepts such as Transit Oriented Development (TOD) or New Urbanism, which controls road traffic by increasing the proportion of the public transportation significantly, have been implemented to encourage a modal shift to public transport. However, the level of change required for eliminating environmental problems is a challenging task. Minimizing transportation energy consumption by controlling the increase of the traffic demand and maintaining the level of urban mobility simultaneously is a pressing dilemma for each city. Grasping the impact of the diversity of the urban transport and infrastructure is very important to improve transportation energy efficiency. However, the potential for reducing urban transportation energy consumption has often been ineffectively demonstrated by the diversity of cities. Therefore, the accuracy of evaluating the current efficiency rate of the urban energy consumption is necessary. Nevertheless, quantitative analyses related to the efficiency of transportation energy consumption are scarce, and the research on the current condition of consumption efficiency based on international quantitative analysis is almost nonexistent. On the basis of this background problem definitions, this research first built a database of the transportation energy consumption of private modes in 119 cities, with an attempt to reflect individual travel behaviors calculated by Person Trip data. Subsequently, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used as an assessment method to evaluate the efficiency of transportation energy consumption by considering the diversity of the urban traffic features in the world cities. Finally, we clarified the current condition of consumption efficiency by attempting to propose a target values for improving transportation energy consumption.

Keyword : Efficiency of transportation energy consumption, Global cities database, Railway infrastructure, Travel behavior,