Investigating correlates of personal and freight road transport energy consumption: A case study of England

In most countries worldwide, the transport sector is responsible for a large proportion of energy consumption, the emissions of which have adverse effects on the environment and human health. It is therefore important to understand the determinants of road transport energy consumption in an attempt to minimise these adverse effects. This paper examines the association which road transport energy consumption, for both personal and freight uses, has with a number of area-level factors, covering a host of socio-economic, built environment and travel mode choice variables. We considered England as our case study, using local authority level data. A random parameters multilevel regression model was utilised in order to accommodate the hierarchical structure of the data, with local authorities nested within major areas of England, and to address unobserved heterogeneity more fully. We paid a particular attention to understand the association between levels of active travel and road transport energy consumption, as this is less-understood. Most notably, gross disposable household income per capita had a positive association with personal road transport energy consumption, and the proportion of walking and cycling had a negative association with both personal and freight consumption. The analysis presented here may be useful in modelling the effect that anticipated changes might have on road transport energy consumption, for instance, new transport developments. In particular, local authorities may consider making a concerted effort at promoting active travel as this was found to be highly negatively associated with road transport energy consumption. As well as this, an insight into the disparity in transport energy consumption between geographical areas is provided, which may otherwise go unobserved.