Estimating Transportation Footprints: A Case Study for a University Campus

Abstract: The transportation industry significantly contributes to air pollution and uses enormous amounts of energy, effectively playing a significant role in climate change and global warming. The different sectors contributing to this worldwide issue are increasing their efforts to reduce their emissions footprint, including Universities and the Healthcare realm. To this end, it is imperative to be able to estimate our transportation footprints. This work presents a method to estimate commute footprints using 3 data sources, with a case for the UC Davis Health Campus. The 3 data sources employed in this work are a travel diary, big data, and the Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP). We designed a travel diary for the University of California, Davis Health Campus (UCDH Campus), which was distributed to roughly 16,000 staff, faculty, and students asking them about their daily commute habits, among other transportation matters, to compute their travel mode split, emissions, and energy footprint. The study presents the incorporation of a travel diary to collect data, the application of ArcGIS network analyst and geodatabase, the supplementation of Google API, the use of Replica big data, the implementation of the Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) to estimate the commute footprint. The travel diary results determined the mode split, Google API tabulated the distance for each commute collected and the emissions per year, and Replica big data and the CTPP assisted in validating the results. The results of this case study showed that drive-alone vehicles were the highest travel mode used across all three data sets. This also leads to the highest source of emissions per year being from drive-alone vehicles with carpool commute being the second highest source of NO X . Results of this developed approach would assist any institution in determining their commute footprint, track the success of their policies, and lead to plans for becoming more sustainable.