Abstract The quality of public service transportation highly depends on the country's context, including investment, infrastructure development, and technology-based innovation in the transport sector. The core innovation of the present study is the asymmetric impacts of the airline, railway, waterway, and road on environmental pollution in China. This research analyzed and highlighted the most susceptible transportation system in China, using the newly developed Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model from 1985 to 2018. The results of the NARDL are positive shock and negative shock between CO2 emission and four mode-specific transportation development that led to an increase in environmental cost in the short run. The study findings divulged that airline, road, and waterway operational mileage per capita of both positive and negative transportation shocks had worsened the environmental pollution in China. On the other hand, the railway is successfully improving environmental quality in China. In order to enforce policies, local authorities should be supportive of urban public services (e.g., buses and metro) and improve public transportation services. Simultaneously, policymakers may also introduce new creative ideas for a sharing economy, such as shared bicycles and automobiles to reduce the use of private vehicles. These insights of the study could assist policymakers to improve policies for the four specific modes of transportation to better adapt to climate change and associated environmental stressors in China.