Work

A methodological framework for microscale mapping of carbon emissions from daily multimodal travel: Application to the Helsinki Metropolitan Area

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Daily urban travel is a major contributor to carbon emissions, posing a great challenge for reaching climate neutrality. Although there are strategies to estimate transport-related emissions, the spatially heterogeneous character of urban infrastructure and a lack of granular data hinder the identification of high and low-emission neighbourhoods for targeted interventions. In particular, given detailed spatiotemporal variations and multimodal mobility characteristics, scalable approaches for jointly estimating emissions from private cars and public transport (PT) at a microscale are lacking.This work fills in these gaps by introducing a data-driven framework to estimate and evaluate daily CO2 emissions from both private car and PT travel with high spatial resolution in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland. Our method combines Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with a Vehicle Miles Traveled -based bottom-up approach. For microscale analysis, we use open-source transport routing tools to compute trip-wise travel characteristics (distance and time) and fine-scale mobile phone-based spatiotemporal origin-destination data to estimate travel demand between given locations, which are combined with LCA vehicle emission factors to estimate the emissions. Furthermore, we use spatial autocorrelation methods to find statistically significant clusters of high and low-emission neighbourhoods in the study area. We validate our quantitative estimations against official municipal transport emission statistics. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to offer a scalable spatio-temporal estimation method for commute-related car and PT emissions. The results provide new possibilities for planning sustainable transport system, enabling more targeted incentives and policies at hyperlocal level.

Source: Sustainable Cities and Society

DOI: 10.1016/j.scs.2026.107226

Authors: Subhrasankha Dey, Cesar Marín-Flores, Henrikki Tenkanen

Institution: Aalto University

Language: English

Topic: Transportation Planning and Optimization

Subfield: Transportation

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Climate action

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,870