How does transportation infrastructure affect urban carbon emissions? an empirical study based on 286 cities in China

With the extensive and in-depth exploration of the relationship between municipal infrastructure and carbon emissions in prefecture-level cities, the implicit internal relationship with traffic has become increasingly profound. Based on the Spatial Dubin Model (SDM) and mediation effect theory, the affiliation mechanism of transportation infrastructure affecting carbon emissions was investigated using a panel dataset of 286 cities in China during a 15-year period from 2002 to 2017. The findings revealed that carbon emissions may cluster in space, especially in developed regions in China, which exhibit high-high aggregation, and transportation infrastructure, industrial structure, energy consumption, and the improvement in Internet of things information technology promote communication and flow between prefecture-level cities, but the nexus between traffic system and carbon emissions is nonlinear and endogenous, especially road infrastructure exacerbating peripheral urban carbon emissions through industrial agglomeration effects and tourism mobility effects as mediating factors. In terms of nationalized industrial distribution, the strategy for large-scale development of western China and the shift in economic and industrial focus to less developed prefecture-level cities fit with the empirical results of this study. Moreover, optimizing the industrial structure and developing clean energy could effectively mitigate carbon emissions. Policy-makers could also change residents’ cultural consumption perceptions by promoting green tourism and government subsidies to achieve China’s carbon neutrality policy goals.