Estimating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from paratransit in Bandung, Indonesia: Reducing the transaction costs of generating conservative emissions baselines

In developing countries, paratransit often meets essential mobility needs with older, inefficient vehicles that degrade air quality and emit greenhouse gases (GHGs). International climate change finance mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or Green Climate Fund (GCF) could help fund cleaner vehicles. However, these mechanisms require generating a credible business‐as‐usual GHG baseline to compare against actual emissions. For paratransit, irregular scheduling and erratic driving behaviour add to a well‐documented list of factors that make the transaction costs prohibitively expensive for constructing robust transport baselines. This paper compares the relative accuracy and affordability of constructing five baselines for motorcycle taxis or ojeks in Bandung, Indonesia. The baselines that were constructed incorporate data that was gathered from one day and one week studies using revealed preference surveys as well as using real time global positioning systems (GPS) over one week into fuel efficiency and fuel consumption‐based emissions calculation techniques. The calculations show that the week‐long fuel consumption survey data generated the lowest fuel efficiency and highest GHG estimates. Driver survey data may therefore help construct a relatively low cost conservative baseline, especially when triangulated by GPS‐verified distance travelled data. The study concludes with several promising future research areas, including expanding the period of estimation for paratransit; examining the relationship between self‐reported distance and fuel consumption data; optimizing survey administration; and promoting climate finance mechanisms that engage stakeholders to lower the transaction costs of data gathering.