GONÇALVES, Daniel; GOES, George; D'AGOSTO, Márcio; ROVERE, Emilio. Development of Policy-Relevant Dialogues on Barriers and Enablers for the Transition to Low-Carbon Mobility in Brazil. Sustainability 2022, 14(24), 16405.

Resumo: Establishing viable targets and pathways to achieve low-carbon mobility is proving to be a growing challenge, especially in emerging economies. Brazil has faced persistent economic and political crises, impacting current and future climate policies. The acceleration of resource exploitation and environmental degradation has increased the role of the transport sector in mitigating Brazilian emissions. Despite advances in instruments aimed at high-capacity infrastructure and the biodiesel and ethanol markets, electric mobility and other advanced biofuels, such as biokerosene and green diesel, are moving slowly. Part of this stems from severe technical, policy, and financial barriers that need to be addressed. This paper identifies the main barriers faced and the instruments needed to accelerate decarbonization in the Brazilian transport sector. To this purpose, a stakeholder-oriented approach is developed and applied to distill low-carbon opportunities and enablers over the next decade. This article reveals the important relationship between climate commitments, the different obstacles faced, and the possible consequences, taking different perspectives on appropriate reference points. By 2025, instruments aimed at electric mobility and public transport, although still scarce in current policies, will have greater potential for implementation. This contrasts with other advanced biofuels, which are not expected until the end of the decade.

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SILVEIRA-SANTOS, Tulio; PORTUGAL, Licinio; RIBEIRO, Paulo. Using a Discrete-Event Simulation Model for Evaluating the Operational Performance of Toll Plazas. Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 2023

Resumo: Toll plazas are commonly described as a potential bottleneck due to the collection process at specific points on the highway. In a highway concession model, tolls are used to cover the majority of infrastructure costs. However, not all existing road concessions have toll plaza–related key performance indicators (KPIs), resulting in less efficient operations for transport managers and road users. To address this issue, this paper presents a discrete-event simulation (DES) model for policy analysis and the model for the planning, management, and evaluation of toll plazas using an extensible simulation package with animation capabilities, built by selecting modules that contain process features. The DES describes situations in which entities (vehicles) arrive, wait in the queue (if necessary), and then are attended to before leaving the system, either directly or indirectly. As a result, the simulation is based on discrete events (arrivals and departures) and statistical process data. This paper examines data from Brazil’s first public–private partnership (PPP) project in the area of road infrastructure and analyzes the toll plaza in Itaúna/MG using a case study methodology. The DES model was used in this case study, and the results show that the toll plaza was in good operating condition during the peak hour analyzed because the vehicular flow was lower than the system capacity. The willingness to pay the toll rate through the concept of open road tolling or a free-flow system, on the other hand, would provide significant benefits to road users because it would significantly reduce the time it takes to cross the toll plaza. The developed DES model assists toll plaza managers in making decisions while keeping in mind the need to comply with the operational efficiency measures agreed upon in the concession contracts.

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GHISOLFI, Verônica; TAVASSZY, Lóránt; CORREIA, Gonçalo; CHAVES, Gisele; RIBEIRO, Glaydston. Dynamics of freight transport decarbonisation: a conceptual model. Journal of Simulation

Resumo: As part of the global efforts to mitigate climate change, policymakers are designing measures to reduce the carbon emissions of the freight transport system. As global agreements for decarbonisation specify strict time windows, it is important to understand the speed at which the transport system is capable of changing. Our paper proposes a causal loop diagram based on System Dynamics that qualitatively maps the system’s causal and dynamic responses to five key decarbonisation strategies. As the main contribution, this conceptual model provided a broad overview of the freight system, formed by subsystems that interact with each other through feedback loops, forming its dynamic behaviour. Through this conceptual modelling effort, we can identify the rebound effects of policies over the whole system, which could defeat the desired decarbonisation results. The model pointed out policies and feedback loops as the dynamic levers to promote freight decarbonisation and influence the system’s dynamic responses.

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HERSZENHUT, Daniel; PEREIRA, Rafael; PORTUGAL, Licinio; OLIVEIRA, Matheus. The impact of transit monetary costs on transport inequality. Journal of Transport Geography, 2022

Resumo: Transport inequality analyses are often informed by accessibility estimates based solely on travel time impedance, ignoring other elements that might hinder access to activities, such as the monetary cost of a trip. This paper examines how and to what extent simultaneously incorporating both time and monetary costs into accessibility measures may impact transport inequality assessment. We calculate job accessibility by transit in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using cumulative opportunity measures under distinct combinations of temporal and monetary thresholds, and compare how inequality levels vary across different scenarios. We find that the most common research practice of disregarding monetary costs tends to overestimate accessibility levels. However, stricter monetary constraints do not necessarily result in more unequal scenarios. How accessibility inequality is affected by monetary costs is highly dependent on what combinations of temporal and monetary cut-offs are considered in the analysis. In the case of Rio, opting for lower monetary thresholds when looking at shorter trips leads to inequality levels lower than those found in the no monetary threshold scenario, but results in higher inequality levels when allowing for longer trips. We find that the impact of monetary costs on transport inequality estimates depend on a complex interaction between fare policies, the spatial organization and operational characteristics of transit systems, and the spatial co-distribution of opportunities and residential locations. The paper thus highlights that conclusions and policy recommendations derived from transport inequality analyses can be affected in non-intuitive ways by the interplay between temporal and monetary constraints. Future research should investigate how different combinations of travel time and monetary costs thresholds affect inequality estimates in different contexts.

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