Impacts of fuel consumption taxes on mobility patterns and CO2 emissions using a system dynamic approach

Resumen

Current transport behaviour leads to increasing congestion of the infrastructure, growing dependence on fossil fuels, increasing energy demand, and growing CO2 emissions. Policies based principally on increasing system speed and in particular car speeds will lead to greater urban sprawl with increases in average trip lengths. Time saved by speed increases are traded for more distance. This trend is not sustainable in the longer term. Transport policies based just on time savings for citizens may not be the basis for our city planning strategy. The same happens with transport cost. With underpriced transport, the market undervalues land use location, which again may lead city to sprawl and could induce greater trip lengths. In this study, the efficiency of a fuel consumption or CO2 tax policy is analysed as a policy to internalise externalities of transport in a fair travel cost. Based on system dynamics theory, an integrated land use and transport model is proposed in order to assess the effects and impacts of such policy in the short, medium and long term. Different scenarios related to clean vehicles are incorporated. This model is applied to three cities Madrid, Vienna and Leeds and compares their results.