ICT Solutions in Transportation Systems: Estimating the Benefits and Environmental Impacts in the Lisbon

Information and communication technologies (ICT) holds the potential to dramatically change the way people drive and their mobility patterns, thus potentially reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollutants and fatalities. This work studies the potential environmental and economic impacts of implementing ICT measures in personal transportation for three scenarios of ICT applications. In the first application, the effects of limiting driving speed are investigated. Non-compliance with speed limits accounts for a large part of fatal car accidents in Portugal, and therefore understanding the impact of such applications is crucial in the context of a national transportation safety policy. In this application, stricter speed limits can be obtained either by on-board vehicle devices influencing the driver not to exceed certain speed limits or on the road network imposing lower speed limits. In the second application, the impacts of fostering an eco-driving behavior are studied. This case studies the impact of a massive adhesion by the public to eco-driving using ICT to present the drivers with the results of their behavioral changes. The third case study assesses the impacts of the implementation of a taxation system based on on-board vehicle devices that indicate where and when the vehicle is being driven and rewarding or penalizing the driver for it. For this study the Lisbon region was addressed. The results show that different ICT applications can have considerable impacts in terms of energy consumption reductions: Scenario 2 (with main variable being speed limitation) reached a 12% reduction in 2020 compared to the BAU (the expected energy consumption from 2011 to 2020 based on Baptista et al. 2011), followed by Scenario 4 (with main variable being eco-driving) with a 5.5% reduction, and the taxation Scenario 6 presented a 1.8% reduction. In terms of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the avoided CO2 emissions from implementing these scenarios varies from 19 to 276 kton in Scenarios 3 (with main variable being eco-driving) and 2 respectively. In terms of the avoided cost from the fuel not consumed and CO2 emissions not emitted, as well as the revenue from the taxation scheme, the scenario results range from 9 to 134 M€ for Scenarios 3 and 2 respectively.