Today India has about 4 million vans on the street and these carry about 70% of the country’s domestic freight. With the freight exercise of vans projected to grow by greater than two instances by 2050 and vans already answerable for about half the well-to-wheel CO₂ emissions from on-road transport, adopting zero-emission applied sciences similar to battery electrical and fuel-cell electrical vans is crucial to decarbonizing the transport sector and attaining India’s local weather objectives.  

But a profitable transition to zero-emission vans would require intensive information, together with about truck journey patterns and operations. In India, the information that’s at present accessible to the general public has gaps and isn’t in a kind that’s helpful for researchers and policymakers. Fortunately, there are a number of methods to start to fill these gaps. 

It’s not troublesome to see the place the information challenges come from. For one, trucking in India is basically unorganized: 80% of the operators have small fleets of fewer than 10 vans. Beyond the sheer multiplicity of truck operators, small operators have a tendency to not log information about their operations like bigger fleets do. For one other, there’s restricted information printed by the nationwide authorities. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) maintains the nationwide register of automobiles registered by regional transport places of work and it supplies up-to-date data on the registration of various kinds of automobiles disaggregated by gasoline kind, car lessons, and area of registration. MoRTH additionally publishes an annual road transport yearbook that studies national-level freight exercise in tonne-km estimated as a operate of gross home product, however researchers discover that these estimates are considerably overestimated. Furthermore, information on the age of automobiles, annual car exercise, load issue, and power consumption is scarce. This leads to a variety of baseline energy consumption estimates and projections for India’s truck fleet.  

International examples provide methods to enhance. The European Union carried out a regulation in 2012 that mandates the gathering of assorted information on street freight transport via regular surveys about fleet operators, their operations, and items transported. In addition, the EU-funded European Transport Policy Information System (ETISplus) challenge consolidated numerous datasets into a brand new reference dataset of street freight transport at numerous ranges: main socio-economic area (NUTS1), states (NUTS2), and district or county (NUTS3). This was instrumental in estimating truck movement on the European freeway community and growing recommendations for electrical car charging infrastructure deployment targets within the European Union for 2030.  

Similarly, within the United States, freeway statistics compiled by the Federal Highway Authority include annual common every day site visitors depend at totally different street sections from state transport companies via the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS), which makes use of equipment similar to loop detectors and laser sensors. This dataset has supported research on county-level zero-emission truck charging and freeway hydrogen refueling wants. 

With these in thoughts, listed here are some alternatives that we see for India. First, there are more than 1,000 toll plazas on nationwide and state highways that already use FASTag, a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-based digital toll assortment system that was launched in 2014. Additionally, the MoRTH is conducting pilots for an automatic number plate recognition system and plans to introduce GPS-based toll collection to switch toll plazas in the long run. Toll tax assortment recurrently captures information on every day site visitors disaggregated by totally different car segments. The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), beneath the MoRTH, is answerable for growing, managing, and sustaining nationwide highways, and this information may probably be captured and processed by the NHAI or an knowledgeable company to estimate site visitors counts disaggregated by car varieties at totally different street sections and at totally different instances of the day. The NHAI or MoRTH may then publish and preserve this dataset within the public area. Figure 1 reveals what the information movement course of may appear like.