Sustainable development of the public transport sector in EU Countries

Abstract

Nowadays, global warming and climate change are often recurrent topics of discussion. Average global temperatures have risen significantly in recent decades: today, there is an increase of 0.85 C compared to the end of the nineteenth century. Scientists consider a 2C increase over pre-industrial levels as a threshold with dangerous and catastrophic consequences for the climate and the environment. For this reason, the international community agrees that global warming must remain well below a 2C increase. According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), the EU is the third-largest producer of GHG's in the world after China and the United States. For this reason, the EU starts launching several strategic plans and environmental and energy frameworks to mitigate Climate Change by reducing GHG emissions. As a result of the several environmental measures and restrictive policies, the EU-28 achieved in 2017 a reduction of 22 % of the total GHG emissions compared with 1990 levels. However, GHG emissions caused by the transport sector have increased over the past five years, mainly due to the economic growth and the increase in activity levels, despite the improvements in energy efficiency and advanced technologies in the sector. Several commitments and strategies focused on different areas of the whole transport sector were implemented by the European Commission (EC) with the purpose of monitoring and cutting GHG emissions by 60 % compared to 90s levels by 2050. This work highlights the fundamental role of the public transport sector into the EU, as a backbone of the sustainable mobility system for the development of a unified market. It represents the crucial means to reach the objectives set from the Commission. This work focuses on the primary sources of increase in GHG emissions in the transport sector: road and aviation emissions. Two core objectives are considered, with a focus on the public transport sector: the replacement of the diesel city buses with electric (EBs) and hydrogen fuel cell buses (HFCBs) and the substitution of domestic and intra-EU flights with high-speed power trains. The replacement of the current DBs with cleaner fuels and alternative technologies could decrease the air and noise pollution significantly in a city. While the use of power trains, through the commissioning of the high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure across Europe, could represent a significant saving in travel time and emissions. In this context, the EU supports the implementation of the TEN-T project, which includes the construction of an extensive HSR network. It comprises two "levels" of network: the core network, which provides the connection between the major European nodes by 2030 and the extensive network, which covers all European regions by 2050. The outcome of the two cases of studies described a comparative analysis in terms of environmental impacts, costs, and several potential benefits as in efficiency and performance. The results show that the environmental impact would be zero-emission in both cases of studies, but the investment is still higher, mainly due to the immaturity of the technologies and missing infrastructures. The sustainable development of the whole transport sector must be accompanied by the development of new transport infrastructure and clear working guidelines applied by each Member States. In this scenario, technological advancement in the field of renewable energy plays a crucial role in pursuing the objective of providing efficient and sustainable solutions to neutralize and mitigate the current environmental situation of the planet.