Environmental efficiency and energy consumption of highway transportation systems in China

With the rapid development of the Chinese economy and urbanization process, an increasingly large urban transport system has led to increasingly serious resource and environmental problems in China. We combined the super-efficiency slack-based measure model, including undesirable outputs, with the window data envelopment analysis model, which managed panel data, to calculate the environmental efficiencies of highway transportation systems in regions of China. This measured the level of sustainable development in China’s highway transportation systems. Furthermore, we calculated the consumption redundancy of gasoline and diesel, and the excess emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. We analyzed the correlativity among environmental efficiency, nitrogen oxide efficiency, and particulate matter efficiency to research the state of energy consumption and atmospheric pollution on the highway transportation systems in China. The results showed that the overall level of environmental efficiency of highway transportation systems in China was not optimal, with great differences between regions. Most regions had problems with excessive energy consumption and motor vehicle pollution. The Chinese government needs to control both energy consumption and pollutant emissions to manage the environmental problem of atmospheric pollution. •Environmental efficiencies of highway transportation systems were calculated.•Energy consumption redundancy and excess emissions of pollutants were calculated.•The overall environmental efficiency level of the system was not optimal.•Excessive energy consumption and motor vehicle pollution exist in most regions.