Interaction of Urban Traffic Network Structure and Carbon Emission Intensity: A Case Study in Shenzhen

Facing global climate change, reducing carbon emissions from transportation has become an important part of building sustainable cities. Study shows that road is the main source of transport carbon emissions, accounting for 71.7% of the total transport carbon dioxide emissions. Therefore, from the perspective of road structure, the study of transport carbon emission efficiency is beneficial to understand the transport carbon emission. Taking Shenzhen as the research region, this paper establishes a high-resolution road traffic carbon emission inventory by modifying the COPERT model with the energy consumption factor parameters and explores the road structure using space syntax. We analyze the interaction between the road structure and road carbon emission. The results show that: the road carbon emission intensity of Shenzhen has the distribution characteristics of “the core is strong and the edge is weak”. Trunk roads connecting the city groups are the carbon emission intensity core; there was a significant negative correlation between road integration and road carbon emission intensity. However, there was a significant positive correlation between road accessibility and road transport carbon emission intensity. Enhancing the local integration and dispersing the demand pressure on the trunk roads are effective ways to reduce traffic carbon emissions in the future.