Tourism, Transportation and Low-Carbon City System Coupling Coordination Degree: A Case Study in Chongqing Municipality, China

Tourism and transportation have extremely complex interactions. Tourism developments have expanded demand and stimulated transportation development, which has consequently affected the environment of cities striving towards low-carbon sustainable development. Therefore, there has been an increased research focus on the coordinated binary development of the tourism and transportation industries to ensure sustainable low-carbon cities. To this end also this paper first developed a comprehensive evaluation index system with three subsystems, seven aspects, and 31 indicators. Then, entropy weight and gray correlation were combined to determine the index weights and a physics coupling concept employed to build a tourism, transportation and low-carbon city (TTLC) coupling coordination degree model, which was then applied to quantitatively analyze the coupling and evolutionary trends in Chongqing's TTLC efforts from 2008 to 2017. It was found that the overall coupling coordination was volatile and rising, and that industry scale, industry performance, and energy consumption had the most significant impact on the coupled systems, indicating that these key factors must be considered in macro decision-making. In general, it was shown that the combination of the coupling coordination degree model and entropy weight gray correlation was able to effectively evaluate dynamic coupling relationships.