Project Summary
With the increasing public understanding of the health impacts of air pollution from motor vehicle operation, policy makers need better tools for analyzing the effectiveness of regional policies designed to reduce air pollution. Indeed, the four-step process, which is the current state-of-the-practice in transportation modeling, is inadequate for this task, and micro-simulation, while promising, is very time consuming. We therefore propose to incorporate vehicular emissions into a dynamic mesoscopic traffic model to create a tool that will generate information about traffic flow, vehicle speeds, and emissions of CO2 and various criteria pollutants (PM10, NO2, and CO) on large scale networks. This tool will help evaluate the effectiveness of regional policies such as mandating a certain concentration of biofuels in gasoline or diesel, promoting hybrid electric vehicles (cars or trucks), or replacing older trucks with cleaner ones as is currently done for the San Pedro Bay Ports drayage trucks. In addition, our application to the road network linking the SPBP to the Inland Empire via downtown Los Angeles will provide new insights into various policies that could relieve the dual burdens of congestion and air pollution from communities affected by freight transportation to and from the SPBP.