Skip to main content

How public education can help reduce vehicle emissions, fuel use

The Mineta Transportation Institute has released its newest research report, Ecodriving and Carbon Footprinting: Understanding How Public Education Can Result in Reduced Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Use, which provides a review and study of ecodriving. The report found that exposure to ecodriving information influenced people's driving behaviour and some maintenance practices. While not everyone modifies their behaviour after reviewing this information, even small behavioural shifts due to inexpensive
April 26, 2012 Read time: 1 min
The 5277 Mineta Transportation Institute has released its newest research report, Ecodriving and Carbon Footprinting: Understanding How Public Education Can Result in Reduced Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Use, which provides a review and study of ecodriving. The report found that exposure to ecodriving information influenced people's driving behaviour and some maintenance practices. While not everyone modifies their behaviour after reviewing this information, even small behavioural shifts due to inexpensive information dissemination could be a cost effective way to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. These methods could augment more costly "dynamic ecodriving" approaches, which give continuous feedback through on-board monitoring devices.

The complete report includes nearly 40 figures and tables to illustrate key points. It is available for free download here.

Related Content

  • June 25, 2012
    New research helps planners address California's air quality and urban sprawl controls
    The Mineta Transportation Institute has released a peer-reviewed research report, An Economic and Life Cycle Analysis of Regional Land Use and Transportation Plans. This study is the third in a series that applies a new form of spatial economic model to examine the economic effects, the distribution of those effects, and their implications for California's Assembly Bill (AB) 32 and Senate Bill (SB) 375 implementation. These bills are intended to significantly reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) and urban sprawl b
  • June 1, 2012
    Guide on how to improve bike network connectivity with modest changes
    The Mineta Transportation Institute has released a peer-reviewed research report, Low-Stress Bicycling and Network Connectivity. As part of its work, the research team created measures of low-stress bicycle route connectivity that can be used to evaluate and guide bicycle network planning. As a result, the team proposed a set of criteria by which road segments can be classified into four levels of traffic stress (LTS). The report includes a sample case study in which every street in San Jose, California, is
  • June 22, 2012
    Would Americans support increased taxes to improve highways, streets, and transit?
    The Mineta National Transit Research Consortium has released a peer-reviewed research report, What Do Americans Think about Federal Tax Options to Support Public Transit, Highways, and Local Streets and Roads? Results from Year 3 of a National Survey. that summarises the results of a national random-digit-dial public opinion poll that asked 1,519 respondents if they would support various tax options for raising federal transportation revenues. Special focus was placed on understanding what would motivate pe
  • May 18, 2012
    New framework to plan traffic routing in no-notice disasters
    The Mineta Transportation Institute has released its newest peer-reviewed research report, A Framework for Developing and Integrating Effective Routing Strategies within the Emergency Management Decision-Support System. It describes the modelling, calibration, and validation of a multi-modal traffic-flow simulation of the San Jose, California, downtown network. It also examines various evacuation scenarios and first-responder routings to assess strategies that would be effective during a no-notice disaster.