The concept of ‘low carbon development’ (LCD) emerged from the concerns
of developing countries on development policy and climate change rather than
climate change alone. As the transport sector in most developing countries is
unsustainable, ‘low carbon development in transport’ (LCDT) plans should
address approaches to reduce emissions from transport, while maintaining or
improving transport, as a catalyser of development. LCDT, as such, may pave
a pathway towards LCD. Due to the complexity and uncertainty involved in
long-term planning tasks, scenario-based planning support systems (PSS) have
been regarded as useful tools for exploring future impacts of any kind of plans
and policies. Thus, this paper aims at developing an urban accessibility based
PSS for evaluating different scenarios of LCDT plans regarding their potential
towards low carbon transport development in Kathmandu Metropolitan City
(KMC). This modelling framework combines an accessibility analysis and
Activity-Structure-Intensity-Fuel (ASIF) framework in a GIS-based modelling
platform. Based on interviews with government officials and documents of the
Kathmandu Sustainable Urban Transport (KSUT) project, three plans were
identified as qualifying for LCDT plans and were evaluated under high and
low population growth scenarios. The evaluation shows that there could be an
increase in accessibility along with emissions reduction gains for the current
public transport (PT) improvement plan as well as for a plan of expanding the
number of trolley buses in the PT vehicle fleet, under assumptions of a low
population growth scenario.