Electric Road Systems: Strategic Stepping Stone on the Way towards Sustainable Freight Transport?

Abstract

Electrification of the transport sector has been pointed out as a key factor for tackling some of today's main challenges, such as global warming, air pollution, and eco-system degradation. While numerous studies have investigated the potential of electrifying passenger transport, less focus has been on how road freight transport could be powered in a sustainable future. This study looks at Electric Road Systems (ERS) in comparison to the current diesel system. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development was used to assess whether ERS could be a stepping stone on the way towards sustainability. Strategic life-cycle assessment was applied, scanning each life-cycle phase for violations against basic sustainability principles. Resulting sustainability "hot spots" were quantified with traditional life-cycle assessment. The results show that, if powered by renewable energy, ERS have a potential to decrease the environmental impact of freight transport considerably. Environmental payback times of less than five years are achievable if freight traffic volumes are sufficiently high. However, some severe violations against sustainability principles were identified. Still, ERS could prove to be a valuable part of the solution, as they drastically decrease the need for large batteries with high cost and sustainability impact, thereby catalyzing electrification and the transition towards sustainable freight transport.

A Systematic Literature Review of Green and Sustainable Logistics: Bibliometric Analysis, Research Trend and Knowledge Taxonomy

“…Many emerging logistics systems were proposed in recent years. Such as urban consolidation center [104], electric road system [105], intelligent transportation system [106] and packaging benchmarking system [107], etc. Meanwhile, some soft applied techniques, such as big data [108], internet of things [109] and cloud computing platform [110], have also been applied to logistics operations to support the sustainable development of the emerging systems.…”

Green Logistics Development Decision-Making: Factor Identification and Hierarchical Framework Construction

“…In recent years, various logistics facilities are emerging. For instance, urban consolidation centers [22], intelligent transportation systems [23,24], shipment tracking systems [25], intelligent inventory routing planning systems [26], electric road systems [27] and packaging benchmarking systems [28]. The construction of logistics facilities is beneficial to carbon emission reduction [29] and fleet structure optimization [30].…”

Impact of Time Restriction and Logistics Sprawl on Urban Freight and Environment: The Case of Beijing Agricultural Freight

“…Similarly, Li and Huang [29] focused on how to alleviate the traffic congestion in the old areas of metropolis, providing an improved ant colony algorithm for the road transportation planning and using traffic simulation to prove its validity. Other issues, parking, road classification, crowd shipping, and freight demand management, also rely on the traffic simulation [30][31][32][33][34]. Therefore, because of the wide applicability of traffic simulation, we decided to adopt this method to study our research questions.…”