Fuel consumption and environmental implications in urban passenger transport in Kigali Rwanda

Abstract

Transport, particularly, road transport is very important to the society by its simplification of the movement of the people and goods, its supports on economic growth and play an important role in job creation. The positive facts are associated with the hazards to both human health and environment. The rapid growth of both population and urbanization accelerate the consequences caused by urban passenger transport when the application of policies is inadequate. During this study LEAP (long range energy alternative planning) model was used in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions analysis for both public and private vehicles. In this analysis we used three scenarios which are: Business as usual (BAU), in scenario 1, we considered the gasoline and diesel driven vehicles to be 55% and 45% respectively whereas in scenario 2, we considered the number of public and private vehicles to be 60% and 40% respectively. By analysing each scenario, we saw that for the second scenario the fuel consumption was estimated at 151.4 million gallon (US) and the CO2 emissions equivalent from both private and public vehicles are 523.5 thousand Metric Tonnes with the contribution of 69.9% of emissions from private vehicles. These results show that in all three scenarios private vehicles contribute more in CO2 emissions equivalent.