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Description
Climate change is an emerging problem that is already having widespread impacts with global implications, but that must be addressed on a community scale. Since 2002, California has passed much legislation aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change. This has prompted many communities throughout the state to begin creating greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories and adopting climate action plans (CAPs) to meet statewide regulations. National City is one of these communities, but their current CAP (adopted in 2011) falls short of the recently passed Executive Order B-30-15, which sets a California GHG emission reduction target of 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. This translates to the need for National City to develop and implement additional GHG emission reduction strategies to meet the statewide mandate. Fully, 65% of the emissions in National City are attributable to transportation. This research seeks to address this transportation issue through 3 main objectives. First, predicting the emission reductions from the implementation of a bikeshare system by applying differentiating factors to 2011-2014 ridership trends from Colorado's Boulder B-Cycle. Second, applying GIS spatial analyses and multiple linear regression to examine the relationship between San Diego Trolley ridership and the recent implementation of several DecoBike stations. And finally, determining the relationship between National City trolley ridership and fuel prices from 1995 through 2011 by measuring the cross elasticity of demand. 2017-2020 GHG emission reductions from bikeshare system implementation in National City were found to be minimal (13-25 MTCO2e/year). In order for the cycling to provide significant GHG emission reductions (~9%), one-third of all trips made on local roads in National City would have to be made by bicycle. Overall, the implementation of several DecoBike stations in San Diego was determined not to have a statistically significant (p < 0.05) effect on trolley ridership. A station by station analysis revealed that 1 out of the 26 stations analyzed was significantly impacted by a nearby bikeshare station (_ = 0.036). Finally, gas prices were found to have a cross-price elasticity of between -.162 and -.146 on trolley ridership at the 8th and 24th Street stations in National City.
