Abstract
A life cycle assessment (LCA) framework is applied to evaluate environmental load from road transport systems, including infrastructure and vehicle travel. The results indicate that reductions in the environmental load from improvements in vehicle fuel consumption are greater than the increases due to infrastructure construction and induced traffic, resulting in an overall reduction in the environmental load. This framework provides important results as follows: 1) evaluation of the uncertainty of diffusion of low-CO2 vehicles and changes in traffic demand, 2) evaluation boundaries that are defined for each scope and definitions of boundaries change the interpretation and uncertainty of the results, and 3) sensitivity analyses test and provide a description of the uncertainty. This framework is applied to the removal of a railway crossing by constructing an elevated track and analyzes the resulting change in CO2 emissions.
