Calculation of energy consumption and pollutant emissions on freight transport routes

An important strategy to reduce energy consumption and pollutant emissions is to displace parts of the freight traffic performance from road and air to rail and inland navigation. The calculation with average emission factors, which refer to traffic performances, promises an improvement in comparison to the status quo. If specific transports from a starting point A to a destination B are studied, some objections to using such average emission factors come to light, for example the different distances for the single means of transport, pre-trips and post-trips in the case of bi-modal traffic and different weight load factors. The results of a study, in which the energy consumption and the pollutant emissions were investigated as realistically as possible, show that the use of flat-rate average factors for the comparison of different means of transport in freight transport is not permissible. Further, they show that in regard to climate demands, it is not possible to make general recommendations for specific transport modes. For extensive calculations it is necessary to have, for all transport modes, emission factors which are based on the kilometric performance and differentiated to the vehicle type, the weight load factor, and the operating conditions. At the end of the paper the presented results of a similar study in passenger transport show the same trends.