Environmental Benefits of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)

(PI: Hani Mahmassani, CoPIs: Chandra Bhat, Mike Walton, Susan Handy)

Federal transportation planning requirements such as conformity have an increased influence on transportation planning activities in Texas non-attainment areas. Conformity links transportation planning activities to federal Clean Air Act Amendment regulations. Qualifications of ITS air quality benefits is extremely important to the effort of meeting federal conformity requirements. The objective of this project is to determine the environmental benefits of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) projects. This will provide guidance for future ITS application assessments. The project will focus on transportation air quality benefits that are a result of ITS project implementation. The qualification of ITS air quality benefits must include: mobile source emission reduction, congestion reduction, and cost. The research will identify methodologies and provide a quantitative assessment of ITS environmental benefits by way of an ITS evaluation guidance document. The results must be formatted for use by both policy and technical audiences.

The approach followed for this project will proceed along three tracks. In a first track, immediate simplified tools based on existing procedures, and results from previous studies and demonstration projects, will be identified, synthesized and compiled into immediately usable guidelines for TxDOT and MPO planners. In a second track, our network assignment-simulation methodology will be applied to develop much of the missing impact information for various ITS measures and deployment scenarios. After calibrating the model to specific test bed areas in Texas, many scenarios will be performed and evaluated to extract information that can form the basis of simplified procedures for use by TxDOT and MPO planners. In a third track, additional methodological development specifically intended to capture potential indirect and long-term effects of ITS strategies will be undertaken. Taken together, the study will meet and exceed the study objectives, and provide TxDOT and Texas MPOs with nationally leading stet-of-the-art approaches to address and extremely timely and significant problem.