With support from Energy Foundation China, China Sustainable Transportation Center released its report evaluating low carbon travel in urban neighborhoods in collaboration with the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, CityDNA, and the Green Research Center of Southern Weekly in December 2021.

This report adopts a combination of subjective and objective indicators to evaluate the enabling environment for low carbon travel in residential neighborhoods. Based on past research and expert opinions, the report converts residents’ needs into objective evaluation indicators, which in turn are categorized into four dimensions, i.e. safety, convenience, comfort, and vitality. In combination with the fifth dimension, namely users’ subjective levels of satisfaction, the report assesses the supply of low carbon transportation approaches in communities, public feedback to the supply, and other transport-related conditions in four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Haikou, and Shenzhen—in China. Using tools such as open sourced big data and artificial intelligence, this report analyses the strength and weakness of the neighborhoods’ urban design for decarbonized transportation. After revealing the relationship between low carbon travel behavior and the friendly design, the report also provides targeted improvement recommendations for different types of neighborhoods.