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Considering climate change, recent political debates often focus on measures to reduce CO2 emissions. One key component is the reduction of emissions produced by motorized vehicles. Since the amount of emission directly correlates to the velocity of a vehicle via energy consumption factors, a general speed limit is often proposed. This article presents a methodology to combine openly available topology data of road networks from OpenStreetMap (OSM) with pay-per-use API traffic data from TomTom to evaluate such measures transparently by analyzing historical real-world circumstances. From our exemplary case study of the German motorway network, we derive that most parts of the motorway network on average do not reach their maximum allowed speed throughout the day due to traffic, construction sites and general road utilization by network participants. Nonetheless our findings prove that the introduction of a speed limit of 120 km per hour on the German autobahn would restrict 50.74% of network flow kilometers for a CO2 reduction of 7.43% compared to the unrestricted state.

Road network performance (RNP) is a key element for urban sustainability as it has a significant impact on economy, environment, and society. Poor RNP can lead to traffic congestion, which can lead to higher transportation costs, more pollution and health issues regarding the urban population. To evaluate the effects of the RNP, the involved stakeholders need a real-world data base to work with. This paper develops a data collection approach to enable location-based RNP analysis using publicly available traffic information. Therefore, we use reachable range requests implemented by navigation service providers to retrieve travel times, travel speeds, and traffic conditions. To demonstrate the practicability of the proposed methodology, a comparison of four German cities is made, considering the network characteristics with respect to detours, infrastructure, and traffic congestion. The results are combined with cost rates to compare the economical dimension of sustainability of the chosen cities. Our results show that digitization eases the assessment of traffic data and that a combination of several indicators must be considered depending on the relevant sustainability dimension decisions are made from.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel calculation scheme for the costs of distribution per shipment according to a cost-by-cause principle. We propose to estimate the full costs of distribution routes excluding and including a new consignor. Then, we estimate the marginal costs per shipment and per consignor. The contributions of this paper are (1) a comprehensive list of drivers of Economies of Integration and (2) a calculation scheme, how to estimate true marginal cost of new consignors. Practitioners may deploy the method and insights of this paper for tariff design, negotiations, consignor acquisition, and also demarketing.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41272-021-00324-z

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