Document Type : Research Article
Authors
1
Associate Professor, School of Civil Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.
2
MSc in Transportation Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.
3
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran.
4
MSc in Transportation Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
The transportation sector accounts for a significant portion of global energy consumption and, gasoline is a major fuel consumed in road transport. On the other hand, the excessive consumption of gasoline can lead to an increase in unnecessary trips and road accidents. This study aims to determine the impact of macroscale factors on gasoline consumption. In this regard, we investigated the effect of gasoline price, oil reserves, and income level on gasoline consumption per capita in about 90 countries, including Iran, over a period of 17 years. Also, Rail and Air travel per capita and membership in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) were considered as control variables. For this purpose, one of the classification techniques utilized in the area of data mining, Classification, and Regression Tree (CART), was employed. The variable importance measure (VIM) was calculated to quantify the association of each independent variable with the target variable. The results indicated that oil reserves, gasoline prices, and average income have a normalized significance of 100, 58.5, and 30.3 % respectively. Other variables do not have significant importance. So, higher per-capita gasoline consumption is exclusively involved in oil-rich countries such as Iran. Therefore, considering national oil reserves should be prioritized when comparing fuel consumption across world countries. Also, more expensive gasoline would relatively diminish its use. However, this effect of the gasoline price is mostly confirmed for countries with lower national oil reserves which often have higher prices than their counterparts.
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