Transportation Control Measure Effectiveness in Ozone Nonattainment Areas

(PI: Chandra Bhat; Co-PI: Mike Walton)

Mobile source emissions constitute a major fraction of total atmospheric emissions. Consequently, many metropolitan areas and states are depending on transportation control measures (TCMs) to reduce mobile source emissions as part of an overall strategy to reduce atmospheric emissions. Within this context, it is important to develop a procedure to determine which TCMs (or combination of TCMs) have the most beneficial impact in terms of mobility, emissions, and cost. Such a procedure should be methodologically sound yet application friendly and should be capable of analyzing a wide array of TCM strategies accurately, precisely, and with a speed necessary to guide important transportation air quality planning decisions. This ongoing research is focused on developing such a procedure by refining existing regional travel models to make them more sensitive to TCMs, developing models for improved supplementary traffic input data to the emissions model, and integrating all relevant models within a Geographic Information System (GIS) architecture. As part of assessing the performance of the TCM analysis procedure, several validation exercises are proposed to be conducted by collecting field mobility data before and after TCM implementation and comparing these actual mobility changes with those estimated by the TCM analysis procedure (with Walton as Co-PI).

Keywords: Transportation-air quality analysis, GIS-based travel demand modeling, Transportation policy evaluation.

Areas of Study:

Urban Travel Demand Modeling

Traffic Assignment and Operating Mode Modeling

Modeling of Traffic Inputs to the Emissions Factor Model