Efficiency and emissions from urban transport: Application to world city-level public transportation

This paper measures the efficiency of public transport in world cities using three methods: data envelopment analysis, order-a, and order-m. We analyze cities' transport systems and environmental load by calculating the shadow prices of CO2 emitted from urban transport. We find that efficiencies are lower in several cities in Europe, South Africa, and Western Australia, while they are higher in several cities in India and China. The cities with a high CO2 shadow price show a slight tendency toward having more efficient public transportation. However, the relationships between the CO2 shadow price and the efficiency of the public transport system are not clear-cut depending on the applied methods. Several cities without a high CO2 shadow price may correspond to so-called super-efficient units that can be expressed in the order-m method. Wediscuss implications to infrastructure and urban transport policies. (C) 2016 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.