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" Three Essays on Transportation, Energy and Environmental Policy in Europe "
Lasater, Deniz
Zhang, Junfu
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1104326
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2219188511
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| Main Entry
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Lasater, Deniz
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Zhang, Junfu
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| Title & Author
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Three Essays on Transportation, Energy and Environmental Policy in Europe\ Lasater, DenizZhang, Junfu
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| College
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Clark University
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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178
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| Abstract
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Energy security and global warming are common concerns shared by many countries, including European Union (EU) member countries. Member countries continue adapting new regulations to meet targeted CO2 reductions. At the same time, fuel efficiency and low pollution features of alternative fuel vehicles makes them potential long term investments from divers’ perspective. The aim of the first essay is to analyze the determinants of hybrid vehicle demand, focusing on fuel prices, financial incentives and greenhouse gas emission restrictive policies. The data for this research was sourced from several European Union organizations and multidimensional fixed effects model was used in analyses. The study covered 26 EU member countries and years from 2010 to 2014. Three different incentive types were considered in this research: direct subsidy, annual tax, and one-time tax. The results showed that a thousand euro increase in incentive amount is expected to cause approximately 6% increase in vehicle sales. There was strong evidence that vehicle purchase was positively correlated with income level. New pollution restrictive vehicle policies were very effective instruments. They did not increase the demand for hybrid cars directly, instead they raised the demand for environmental friendly hybrid vehicles. Highly fuel efficient hybrid model sales increased 3% as a result of a 10% rise in gasoline price. Analyses showed that high and low income European Union countries benefited differently from the mentioned three incentive types. The European Commission is taking action for a fundamental modernization of European mobility and transport. Their aim is to help the transportation sector to stay competitive in a socially fair transition towards clean energy and digitalization. The adoption of hybrid cars or full electric vehicles has an important role in achieving those aims, as well as the promotion and usage of public transportation. The second essay’s purpose was to analyze the determinants of public transportation demand in the European Union, focusing on recent CO2 emission regulations for passenger vehicles. The research covered the same five year span covered in the first essay. European Union bus, train, metro, high-speed train ridership demand was estimated by using a panel data with instrumental variable and seemingly unrelated regression methods. Analyses showed that CO2 restrictive policies not only increased hybrid vehicle demand but also raised the public transportation usage. Every EU member country determines its own policy and results revealed that, despite the fact that the effect of restrictions varied between different transportation modes, the impact was close to each other for strong and weak regulations. Both type of policies caused to 6%–12% increase in public transportation usage depending on the transportation mode. The same analyses were conducted by considering three and two transportation modes since not all counties in the mentioned geography provide all mass transit services. The last essay is related with the commuters’ choices of Bosporus transportation in Istanbul, Turkey. The relevant statistics were obtained from various private and public institutions and the study covers the years from 2010 to 2016. Istanbul bus, metro and passenger ferry ridership demand as well as the bridge usage of the private vehicles are estimated based on fuel prices. Increasing environmental and health concerns, as well as governments’ goals to lower foreign oil dependency will continue to reshape existing policies in addition to creating new regulations. Capturing the preferences of the evolving societies will be critical because that knowledge will help to design better transportation systems with limited governmental resources. Long-term strategies should build on the idea of creating a new perception for mobility. Especially in urban areas, private vehicle usage should be the exception and public transportation and other alternatives should be the logical and normal means of travel.
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Economics
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