Modeling determinants of the environmental performance of urban transport infrastructure in six Chinese megacities

Abstract

Environmental performance of urban transport infrastructure (EPUTI) reflects the positive influence of urban transport infrastructure on the natural environment. It is influenced by various determinants, including the inputs of its operational facilities and numerous urban economic and social development factors. In addition, urban transport infrastructure encompasses multiple categories of transportation modes, and their environmental performances may differ; however, they are typically influenced by similar factors. Therefore, it is necessary to use a scientific method to analyze their determinants jointly. This paper examines the environmental performance of different categories of urban transport infrastructure and their determinants, taking six megacities in China as examples. Their EPUTIs are evaluated by the entropy method. The seemingly unrelated regression models are employed to analyze the determinants of the environmental performance across different categories of urban transport infrastructure. The results display that 1) the improvement of environmental performance of urban bus was not significantly relied on the increase of its operational vehicles; 2) the improvement of environmental performance of urban rail transit was mainly relied on the enlargement of scales of their operational vehicles and environmental performance of urban road was significantly negatively affected by the scale of civilian car ownership; 3) urban economic and population scales were still the important determinants of environmental performance of urban transport infrastructure; 4) the investment intensity of urban transport infrastructure and urban technological level have weaker impacts on environmental performance of urban transport infrastructure.