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Car-sharing services are developing at an ever-increasing pace. Taking into account the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions and pursuit of the sustainable development of transport, implementing electric cars in car-sharing fleets is being proposed. On the one hand, these types of vehicles are referred to as emission-free, but on the other hand, their environmental friendliness is questionable due to the emission of carbon dioxide during the production of energy to power them. Although many scientific papers are devoted to the issue of reducing emissions through car sharing, there is a research gap concerning the real production of carbon dioxide by car-sharing vehicles during car-sharing trips. To fill this research gap, the objective of the article was to analyze the actual level of carbon dioxide emissions from combustion and electric vehicles from car-sharing systems produced when renting rides. The test results showed that the electric car turned out to be significantly less emitting. The use of electric vehicles in car-sharing fleets can reduce carbon dioxide emissions from 14% to 65% compared to using cars with internal combustion engines. However, the key role during car-sharing trips is played by the driving style of the drivers, which has been omitted from the literature to date. This should be properly regulated by service providers and focus on the proper use of energy from electric vehicle batteries, especially at low temperatures. The article provides support for operators planning to modernize their fleet of vehicles and fills the research gap concerning car-sharing emissions.

Dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Building up and maintaining stocks requires large amounts of resources; currently stock-building materials amount to almost 60% of all materials used by humanity. Buildings, infrastructures and machinery shape social practices of production and consumption, thereby creating path dependencies for future resource use. They constitute the physical basis of the spatial organization of most socio-economic activities, for example as mobility networks, urbanization and settlement patterns and various other infrastructures. This dataset features a detailed map of material stocks for the whole of Germany on a 10m grid based on high resolution Earth Observation data (Sentinel-1 + Sentinel-2), crowd-sourced geodata (OSM) and material intensity factors. Temporal extent The map is representative for ca. 2018. Data format Per federal state, the data come in tiles of 30x30km (see shapefile). The projection is EPSG:3035. The images are compressed GeoTiff files (*.tif). There is a mosaic in GDAL Virtual format (*.vrt), which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. The dataset features area and mass for different street types area and mass for different rail types area and mass for other infrastructure area, volume and mass for different building types Masses are reported as total values, and per material category. Units area in m² height in m volume in m³ mass in t for infrastructure and buildings Further information For further information, please see the publication or contact Helmut Haberl (helmut.haberl@boku.ac.at). A web-visualization of this dataset is available here. Visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society. Publication Haberl, H., Wiedenhofer, D., Schug, F., Frantz, D., Virág, D., Plutzar, C., Gruhler, K., Lederer, J., Schiller, G. , Fishman, T., Lanau, M., Gattringer, A., Kemper, T., Liu, G., Tanikawa, H., van der Linden, S., Hostert, P. (accepted): High-resolution maps of material stocks in buildings and infrastructures in Austria and Germany. Environmental Science & Technology Funding This research was primarly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950). ML and GL acknowledge funding by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (CityWeight, 6111-00555B), ML thanks the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; project Multi-Scale, Circular Economic Potential of Non-Residential Building Scale, EP/S029273/1), JL acknowledges funding by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), project ESR17-067, TF acknowledges the Israel Science Foundation grant no. 2706/19.

The growing number of electric vehicles in recent years is observable in almost all countries. The country’s energy transition should accompany this rise in electromobility if it is currently generated from non-renewable sources. Only electric vehicles powered by renewable energy sources can be considered zero-emission. Therefore, it is essential to conduct interdisciplinary research on the feasibility of combining energy recovery/generation structures and testing the energy consumption of electric vehicles under real driving conditions. This work presents a comprehensive approach for evaluating the energy consumption of a modern public building–electric vehicle system within a specific location. The original methodology developed includes surveys that demonstrate the required mobility range to be provided to occupants of the building under consideration. In the next step, an energy balance was performed for a novel near-zero energy building equipped with a 199.8 kWp photovoltaic installation, the energy from which can be used to charge an electric vehicle. The analysis considered the variation in vehicle energy consumption by season (winter/summer), the actual charging profile of the vehicle, and the parking periods required to achieve the target range for the user.

The basis for developing logistics solutions in cities is to know the requirements and expectations of current and potential transport users and for decision makers to strive to meet them. In building an urban logistics strategy, it is therefore necessary to take into account different stakeholder groups. Building stakeholder relations should be aimed at involving them in the development of a sustainable transport policy for the city. It should be noted, however, that the importance of stakeholders in transport policy is diverse. This assumption was made in the paper, which aimed to identify the role of the various groups of urban logistics stakeholders in the sustainable movement of people. This challenge is subordinated to the methodology proposed in the paper, which combines the analysis of urban logistics stakeholders and the assignment of roles to them in the pursuit of sustainable flows of people in the city with the identification of tasks in which stakeholders characterized by a particular role should be involved. Achieving the stated goal required collaboration with experts. Research on the roles of stakeholders, as well as the tasks in which they should be involved, was conducted in Polish cities. Infrastructure managers, small mobility organisers, public safety organisations and public transport organisations turned out to be the development leaders who, as a result, were recommended to be included in most tasks by local government units of Polish cities. What deserves special attention in the results obtained, on the other hand, is the role of the unpredictable main player, which is other cities.

Sustainable development requires ensuring the mobility of residents and must not cause deterioration of the quality of the environment in the selected area. The purpose of this study is to verify if the construction of a cross-regional highway through the city centre affected air quality in the neighbourhood of a newly built road. Air quality was assessed based on measurements of concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, which is considered to be typical for automotive sources air pollution. The spectrophotometric method with passive sampling was used in the 24 h NO2 measurements. The calculated mean NO2 concentrations in the periods before and after road construction were within the ranges of 23.2–31.9 μg/m3 and 22.3–28.9 μg/m3, respectively. The relative NO2 concentrations determined in the study for 10 out of 11 sampling points were lower than the unity, including 5 points markedly lower (0.82–0.89). The obtained results indicate that the construction of the new artery by the city centre, using appropriate technical solutions and traffic organization (tunnel, noise barriers, roundabouts, speed limit) likely contributed to an overall reduction in NO2 concentrations. The presented solution may serve as an example for other cities struggling with problems of low air quality associated with inefficient transportation systems.

The European Commission (EC) has set ambitious CO2 emission reduction objectives for the transport sector by 2050. In this context, most decarbonisation scenarios for transport foresee large market penetration of electric vehicles in 2030 and 2050. The emergence of electrified car mobility is, however, uncertain due to various barriers such as battery costs, range anxiety and dependence on battery recharging networks. Those barriers need to be addressed in the 2020–2030 decade, as this is key to achieving electrification at a large scale in the longer term. The paper explores the uncertainties prevailing in the first decade and the mix of policies to overcome the barriers by quantifying a series of sensitivity analysis scenarios of the evolution of the car markets in the EU Member States and the impacts of each barrier individually. The model used is PRIMES-TREMOVE, which has been developed by E3MLab and constitutes a detailed energy-economic model for the transport sector. Based on model results, the paper assesses the market, energy, emission and cost impacts of various CO2 car standards, infrastructure development plans with different geographic coverage and a range of battery cost reductions driven by learning and mass industrial production. The assessment draws on the comparison of 29 sensitivity scenarios for the EU, which show that removing the barriers in the decade 2020–2030 is important for electrification emergence. The results show that difficult policy dilemmas exist between adopting stringent standards and infrastructure of wide coverage to push technology and market development and adverse effects on costs, in case the high cost of batteries persists. However, if the pace of battery cost reductions is fast, a weak policy for standards and infrastructure is not cost-effective and sub-optimal. These policies are shown to have impacts on the competition between pure electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. Drivers that facilitate electrification also favour the uptake of the former technology, the latter being a reasonable choice only in case the barriers persist and obstruct electrification.

A “Well-to-Propeller” Life Cycle Assessment of maritime transport was performed with a European geographical focus. Four typical types of vessels with specific operational profiles were assessed: a container vessel and a tanker (both with 2-stroke engines), a passenger roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Pax) and a cruise vessel (both with 4-stroke engines). All main engines were dual fuel operated with Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) or Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Alternative onshore and offshore fuel supply chains were considered. Primary energy use and greenhouse gas emissions were assessed. Raw material extraction was found to be the most impactful life cycle stage (~90% of total energy use). Regarding greenhouse gases, liquefaction was the key issue. When transitioning from HFO to LNG, the systems were mainly influenced by a reduction in cargo capacity due to bunkering requirements and methane slip, which depends on the fuel supply chain (onshore has 64% more slip than offshore) and the engine type (4-stroke engines have 20% more slip than 2-stroke engines). The combination of alternative fuel supply chains and specific operational profiles allowed for a complete system assessment. The results demonstrated that multiple opposing drivers affect the environmental performance of maritime transport, a useful insight towards establishing emission abatement strategies.

The article pertains to the utilization of the application potential of MCDM/MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Making/Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis) methods in decision-making problems in the field of transport in light of sustainable development. The article consists of a theoretical and an empirical part. As part of the literature studies, a review was carried out on the latest applications of MCDM/MCDA methods for decision-making problems in the field of transport. In the empirical part, a multi-criteria analysis of the placement selection for a strip of expressway located in north-eastern Poland was carried out. For this purpose, a hybrid approach was used, consisting of three selected MCDM/MCDA methods: DEMATEL, REMBRANDT, and VIKOR. The ranking was compared with the results achieved in the EIA report of the investment and the results were obtained by using a different set of MCDM/MCDA methods that were proposed in the first part of the research, i.e., AHP, Fuzzy AHP, TOPSIS, and PROMETHEE. The performed multi-criteria analyses allowed for an eventual multi-dimensional evaluation of the most popular MCDM/MCDA methods currently applied in the field of transport.