Evaluating Community Transportation Emission Methodologies: Fid-Bau Portal

Evaluating Community Transportation Emission Methodologies

Hegg, Daniel / Roewade, David / Scott, Lisa J.

Many communities have committed to reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fulfilling these commitments often includes inventorying emissions, developing a local action plan, setting reduction targets, and measuring progress from plan implementation. Using the Waterloo region as a case study, a comparative analysis of estimation methodologies for community transportation emissions was conducted.The transportation sector is often a large part of many local GHG emission profiles and can be difficult to effectively measure. Three commonly used methodologies were compared and evaluated, vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT), vehicle registration methodology, and retail fuel sales.The evaluation considered accuracy of data inputs and outputs, resources' required ability to replicate for future inventories, and the ability to reflect impacts from the implementation of local actions. It was concluded that the fuel sales method is the least arduous, is reasonably accurate to replicate, and is suitable for monitoring progress.Municipalities would benefit from obtaining fuel sales data within their jurisdictional boundaries to estimate local transportation emissions for their inventory as it will also better reflect progress from implementing their reduction initiatives. Vehicle registration data can further assist with estimating potential reductions from the proposed action plan.