Benchmarking urban sustainable efficiency: a case of Indian cities

Increasing urbanization, in terms of growth in population as well as geographical spread, in the developing countries has significant implications for the transport sector. First is the increase in traffic volume and second, energy consumption. With constraints on energy resource availability, threat to climate change and transport infrastructure inadequacies, the above two implications need immediate attention of the planners and policy makers. However, there is inadequate research in understanding effect of urban system on energy dimension. The present work aims to understand this effect. For this study, urban system is considered as a close boundary system with residential and mobility as major contributors towards transport energy consumption. A set of Indian cities are considered for the study and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a non-parametric technique is applied to study residential and mobility subsystem efficiency against energy subsystem. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.