Study of Emission Reduction: Benefits of Urban Rail Transit

As many cities in China have been planning, establishing and operating urban rail transit (URT), it is necessary to study URT's impacts emission reduction. In this paper, the environmental benefit strategy was addressed through the real operating data and travel behavior data of Beijing's URT, using the skeleton planning method to estimate HC, CO, NOX emission reductions. Moreover, the study calculates the direct economic benefits of URT in terms of fuel consumption savings and air pollution control cost savings. The results show that URT operation can not only encourage the use of URT, but also reduces mobile source emissions substantially, thus creating substantial environmental benefits. Our results show that the URT of Beijing could reduce 1036.733 ton of HC, 85.827 ton of CO, 326.295 ton of NOx, which leads to over 8.56 billion Yuan savings every year. More specifically, the findings of this paper have insightful implications to planning, construction, operation and assessment of URT. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.