Abstract:

Electric mobility has the potential to spearhead transport decarbonisation. While there is vast literature on the potential benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) towards sustainability and national policies of EV adoption, regional and local policies are often overlooked. Hence, this paper aims to capture lessons learned from two bay areas, namely the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) in China and the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) in the United States. These two regions are pioneers in electric mobility within the world's two largest economies. An integrative methodology of transport decarbonisation and backcasting analysis is applied to analyse the progress achieved so far (2000–2018) and project future carbon reduction potentials (2019–2050). A distance-based approach estimated regional and local transport CO2 emissions. The results illustrate that electric mobility has led to carbon reductions of 1.73 Mt CO2 and 0.25 Mt CO2 in 2018 in GBA and SFBA, respectively, contributing to a relative decoupling status in both regions (e = 0.85 & e = 0.14). Intra-regional variability in decoupling status is observed, with stronger spatial variations in GBA. The backcasting analysis suggests that the EV share needs to reach almost 100% before 2035 to achieve the 450 Delayed Action vision. This requires a proactive policy package of cleaner electricity with emissions performance standards, EV sales mandates, expanded public charging infrastructure, and a range of measures to incentivize EV market uptakes. Major driving forces of decoupling, including vehicle kilometre travelled, public transport share, and regional/local EV policies, are also identified and discussed.