The costs of mobility: a data-based method for estimating cost and emissions per kilometre in Finland

Abstract

Transport is major source of CO2 emissions and therefore, there are many different actions and changes in the sector to decrease the emissions. Some of these affect directly to mobility costs for users and a method is needed to both estimate the size of the change, as well as which users will be the ones affected by the change the most. In this study, a method is created using two data sources, Finnish car fleet dataset and National Travel Survey, to estimate the costs of mobility and CO2 emissions per kilometre for different transport modes and user groups. In general, 90% of Finnish mobility costs for domestic land passenger transport is due to private car transport, where the rest 10% is divided evenly between public transport on rail, public transport on road, and taxis. On average, Finnish people pay 48 cents per car kilometre and 14.75 euros per day for the use mobility between all transport modes. The model both allows the overview of current costs as well as calculation of how these will change if a set of new policies affecting the prices are presented in the system.