Environmental Impact of Road Transport : Emission Modeling for Evaluation of Urban Traffic Controls

Road traffic emission has been widely concerned as a big challenge for urban transportation planning and management. In order to quantitatively analyze traffic emission and fuel consumption in the urban area and build computational models for operational traffic environment projects, we have been focused on microscopic emission modeling using on-road dynamic emission data collected by potable emission measurement systems (PEMS) in Chinese cities. Two widely known micro-scale emission models, CMEM and VT-Micro, are evaluated and compared through the model calibration and validation procedures. In addition, by integrating traffic simulation and emission models, we are able of analyzing environmental impacts, in terms of emission and fuel consumption, of a local intersection in Wuhan under different signal control strategies. The proposed method has the potential to be extended for evaluation of urban transport planning as well as other dynamic traffic controls.