COVID-19, Urban Transportation, and Air Pollution

IF 1.3 4区 工程技术 Q3 TRANSPORTATION SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Transport Pub Date : 2021-06-03 DOI:10.2139/ssrn.3859071
Juan Wang, Yifan Yu, Wendao Xue, Yong Tan
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Urban air pollution has severe negative effects on health and the economy, especially in developing and industrializing countries, such as China and India. Although the transportation sector is widely acknowledged as among the largest contributors to urban air pollution, quantifying its causal effects on air pollution is challenging, as decisions to travel are endogenous with air quality. The spread of COVID-19 offers a unique opportunity for causal identification, as the pandemic directly affects decisions to travel but has little direct effect on air pollution. Leveraging the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19-related queries to online search engines as instruments for decisions to travel, controlling for two-way fixed effects, we quantify the effects of three public transportation subsectors (buses, railways, and taxis) and private vehicles on six primary air pollutants (CO, NO2, O3, PM2.5, PM10, and SO2) of 36 central cities of China, using two-stage ridge regression and double/debiased machine-learning models. Our work demonstrates that the negative effects of urban transportation on air quality are likely to be significantly underestimated without addressing endogeneity in the observational data. Further, our estimates after addressing endogeneity indicate that the effects of public transportation and private vehicles on different air pollutants are heterogeneous. Notably, our work shows that air pollution shifts the demand from mass transportation (buses and railways) to taxis. These findings have implications for sustainable transportation planning, operation, and policy evaluation.
COVID-19、城市交通和空气污染
城市空气污染对健康和经济有严重的负面影响,特别是在发展中国家和工业化国家,如中国和印度。尽管交通运输部门被广泛认为是城市空气污染的最大贡献者之一,但量化其对空气污染的因果影响是具有挑战性的,因为出行决定与空气质量是内生的。COVID-19的传播为确定因果关系提供了独特的机会,因为大流行直接影响旅行决策,但对空气污染几乎没有直接影响。利用COVID-19感染数量和在线搜索引擎的COVID-19相关查询作为出行决策的工具,控制双向固定效应,我们量化了中国36个中心城市的三个公共交通子行业(公共汽车、铁路和出租车)和私家车对六种主要空气污染物(CO、NO2、O3、PM2.5、PM10和SO2)的影响,使用两阶段脊回归和双/去偏机器学习模型。我们的工作表明,如果不解决观测数据中的内生性问题,城市交通对空气质量的负面影响可能被严重低估。此外,我们在解决内生性问题后的估计表明,公共交通和私家车对不同空气污染物的影响是异质性的。值得注意的是,我们的研究表明,空气污染将需求从公共交通(公共汽车和铁路)转移到出租车。这些发现对可持续交通规划、运营和政策评估具有启示意义。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Transport
Transport Engineering-Mechanical Engineering
CiteScore
3.40
自引率
5.90%
发文量
19
审稿时长
4 months
期刊介绍: At present, transport is one of the key branches playing a crucial role in the development of economy. Reliable and properly organized transport services are required for a professional performance of industry, construction and agriculture. The public mood and efficiency of work also largely depend on the valuable functions of a carefully chosen transport system. A steady increase in transportation is accompanied by growing demands for a higher quality of transport services and optimum efficiency of transport performance. Currently, joint efforts taken by the transport experts and governing institutions of the country are required to develop and enhance the performance of the national transport system conducting theoretical and empirical research. TRANSPORT is an international peer-reviewed journal covering main aspects of transport and providing a source of information for the engineer and the applied scientist. The journal TRANSPORT publishes articles in the fields of: transport policy; fundamentals of the transport system; technology for carrying passengers and freight using road, railway, inland waterways, sea and air transport; technology for multimodal transportation and logistics; loading technology; roads, railways; airports, ports, transport terminals; traffic safety and environment protection; design, manufacture and exploitation of motor vehicles; pipeline transport; transport energetics; fuels, lubricants and maintenance materials; teamwork of customs and transport; transport information technologies; transport economics and management; transport standards; transport educology and history, etc.
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