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Because of China’s rapid economic development, its transportation system has become one of China’s high-energy-consumption and high-pollution-emission sectors. However, little research has been done which pays close attention to China’s transportation system, especially in terms of energy and environmental efficiency evaluation. In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to measure the energy and environment performance of transportation systems in China with the goal of sustainable development. This paper treats transportation as a parallel system consisting of subsystems for passenger transportation and freight transportation, and extends a parallel DEA approach to evaluate the efficiency of each subsystem. An efficiency decomposition procedure is proposed to obtain the highest achievable subsystem efficiency. Our empirical study on 30 of mainland China’s provincial-level regions shows that most of them have a low efficiency in their transportation system and the two parallel subsystems. There are large efficiency differences between the passenger and freight transportation subsystems. In addition, unbalanced development has occurred in the three large areas of China, with the east having the highest efficiency, followed by central China and then west. Therefore, more measures should be taken to balance and coordinate the development between the three large areas and between the two subsystems within them. Our analysis approach gives data for determining effective measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]