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The European Commission (EC) has published a European Union (EU) Road Safety Framework for the period 2021 to 2030 to reduce road fatalities. In addition, the EC with the EU Directive 2019/1936 requires a much more detailed recording of road attributes. Therefore, automatic detection of school routes, four classes of crosswalks, and divided carriageways were performed in this paper. The study integrated satellite imagery as a data source and the Yolo object detector. The satellite Pleiades Neo 3 with a spatial resolution of 0.3 m was used as the source for the satellite images. In addition, the study was divided into three phases: vector processing, satellite imagery processing, and training and evaluation of the You Only Look Once (Yolo) object detector. The training process was performed on 1951 images with 2515 samples, while the evaluation was performed on 651 images with 862 samples. For school zones and divided carriageways, this study achieved accuracies of 0.988 and 0.950, respectively. For crosswalks, this study also achieved similar or better results than similar work, with accuracies ranging from 0.957 to 0.988. The study also provided the standard performance measure for object recognition, mean average precision (mAP), as well as the values for the confusion matrix, precision, recall, and f1 score for each class as benchmark values for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy renovations of the building stock are a paramount objective of the European Union (EU) to combat climate change. A tool for renovation progress monitoring is energy performance certificate (EPC) labelling. The present study tested the effect of different EPC label classifications on a national database, which comprises ~25,000 EPC values from apartment buildings, detached houses, office buildings, and educational, commercial, and service buildings. Analysing the EPC classes labelling resulting from four different EU methods, we estimated the annual renovation rates, costs, energy savings, and CO2 emissions reduction that would affect the national building stock if each of them was adopted, to fulfil the European Climate Target Plan by the year 2033. The ISO 52003-1:2017 two-point and one-point methods determined a very uneven distribution of renovation rates, from 0.45% to ~9%. Conversely, the Directive 15% recently proposed in COM/2021/802 with uniform rates determined smaller differences and standard deviation, not pushing renovations above 3.70%, namely a rate that once fine-tuned can stimulate realistic, yet effective renovation campaigns. The major differences in renovation rates provided by the studied methods show the need for a harmonized strategy such as the Directive proposal to enable achievement of European targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the challenges of increasing the energy efficiency investments in European Union (EU) residential buildings in the context of achieving climate neutrality by 2050. The paper presents the results of the PRIMES buildings model in key energy policy applications to support cost-effective and fair policy making in buildings across Europe. The model covers, in detail, the building sector for all the EU Member States (MS), segmenting the buildings into many categories. The approach proposed includes non-market barriers in conventional microeconomic modelling, which combined with idiosyncratic preferences can capture poor energy efficiency choices and still represent rational behaviours. The model includes a detailed portrayal of policies specific to the sector, comprising economic and regulatory policies as well as institutional measures. The results of the model show that the removal of non-market barriers is of great importance in reducing energy consumption and increasing both the pace and the depth of renovation investment. However, the institutional measures alone are not enough to induce energy efficiency improvement to the scale required to achieve the climate neutrality objectives. Economic (i.e., subsidies) or regulatory measures (i.e., energy performance standards) are also required to decrease emissions and energy consumption in buildings and the paper compares different configurations thereof. The optimum policy mix obviously derives from a compromise among various aims including the cost-effectiveness of the policy budget and the distributional impacts across building and consumer types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]