Sustainable transportation from a life cycle perspective: A case study of electrifying public transportation in Saskatoon, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To address the GHG emissions from its transportation sector, the Canadian city of Saskatoon recently committed to fully electrifying its bus fleet by 2030. To date, environmental feasibility studies for the city’s looming transition have focused solely on the GHG emissions from bus use, omitting the broader environmental implications from how and where the vehicles are produced, assembled, and dealt with at the end of their functional lives. As the city prepares to roll out its first electric buses, this thesis intends to offer a more robust environmental base from which the city can develop its electrification strategy. It does so by applying the life cycle assessment methodology, relying on a combination of observed driving data, industry data, and data from existing literature. The paper responds to two central research questions: (1) what are the potential cradle-to-grave life cycle emissions reductions of replacing a diesel bus with an electric bus in Saskatoon? And (2) what are the other environmental implications of such a transition from a life cycle perspective? The results indicate life cycle emissions reductions of approximately 99 gCO2e, and despite performing worse in 13 of the 18 assessed midpoint impact categories, the electric bus shows lower external costs when these impacts are monetised. Finally, the results identify grid decarbonisation as a key pathway to maximise emissions reductions while minimising other environmental trade-offs from electrification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".