The threat of global climate change has caused the international community to pay close attention to atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Transportation sector carbon dioxide emissions efficiency (TSCDEE) is a key indicator used to prioritize sustainable development in the transportation sector. In this paper, the epsilon-based measure data envelopment analysis model with undesirable outputs is applied to estimate TSCDEE for 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2016. We also analyze influencing factors using the spatial Durbin model. Research shows that the overall TSCDEE of the Chinese provinces studied was 0.618, indicating that most regions are still in need of improvements. The provinces with the highest TSCDEE are located in developed coastal regions of China. This study shows that factors such as transportation structure, traffic infrastructure level, and technological progress have prominent positive effects on TSCDEE, while both urbanization level and urban population density exert significantly negative effects on TSCDEE. The findings should have a far-reaching impact on the sustainable development of global transportation.

To be successful, energy renovation construction programs in northern China require both proper understanding of the causes of quality failures and effective strategies for renovating existing residential buildings for energy savings. However, surprisingly, although in recent years more attention has been focused on studying quality failures and reducing their causes, such failures still frequently occur in building energy renovation projects. In practice, the causes are not isolated, but rather, stem from complex correlations that impede high-quality performance. Due to their neglect of the causal relationships among these factors in quality failures, project coordinators have been unsuccessful in managing the quality of construction projects. Considering a network of different causes, this work reports on efforts to identify and manage the causes of quality failures in construction processes. A new understanding of the nature of these causes was achieved by considering four sources of data: literature review, opinions of experts, interpretive structural modeling (ISM), and focus groups. Our analysis shows that not only do many causes directly influence construction quality in building energy renovation projects, but also these causes interact with each other. It is noteworthy that external causes remain associated with all internal causes. Drivers of these causes are lack of experienced project managers, unauthorized changes in design documents, incomplete building information in projects, and poor onsite coordination; eliminating them enables solutions to a number of other internal causes. Finally, solutions are proposed to improve the current situation. These solutions fall into the categories of people, materials and equipment, design, and organization, based on the quality management process. The findings of this work provide valuable information for helping both policy makers and practitioners adopt effective policies and measures to manage the construction quality of building energy renovation projects.