Estimates of Transportation Energy Savings with Transportation Management Measures for Varying City Size

Abstract

Since the early 1970's, fuel consumption in the transportation sector has been one of the major issues facing planners trying to conserve energy. Generally, fuel consumption is influenced directly by the number of vehicles, the distance travelled, the operating speed and the overall population of city. Traffic engineers spent a great deal of time solving such a problem sometimes by introducing the concept of traffic management, the different actions and strategies that reduce the fuel consumption and some other times by estimating the energy saving to evaluate the effectiveness of these actions. Despite best efforts, energy savings estimation have shown wide fluctuations. This study provides a preliminary Investigation of the impact of city size, in the medium range, on potential energy savings accrued due to implementation of Transportation Energy Management Measures (TEMM's). The data sources used includes the energy savings for each of five city size groups, subjected to 23 TEMM's. These data were rearranged and regressed over city size by using the CURFIT technique. Formulae were derived for each of the TEMM's. For the purpose of verification, the Community Benefits Analysis program (CBA) was applied to test some of the obtained results. It is thus concluded that the resulting energy savings, using the regressed equations provide a reasonable way to predict potential benefits across the medium range of city sizes.