Decarbonizing Urban Transportation: A Case Study of Montreal

Urban passenger transportation contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions, yet the relative effectiveness of different decarbonization strategies remains difficult to assess due to inconsistent travel demand assumptions across studies. This study conducts a city-scale scenario analysis of daily passenger transportation CO2 emissions for the Island of Montréal using a reconstructed representation of weekday passenger trips. An externally generated, survey-calibrated travel demand dataset is used as a fixed baseline, enabling consistent comparison across six decarbonization scenarios spanning vehicle electrification, modal shift, active travel substitution, and ride pooling. By holding daily travel demand constant, the analysis isolates the emissions impacts attributable to each intervention rather than to changes in mobility patterns. The scenario results represent upper-bound technical mitigation potential and provide system-level insight into how different strategies affect emissions across modes, vehicle categories, and network segments. The study demonstrates the value of city-scale scenario analysis for informing urban transport decarbonization under data-scarce conditions.