Real-world traffic emissions characterization
The RSD provides data of real-world traffic emissions in order to make decisions based on REAL and ACTUAL data. What is not measured, cannot be improved. The first step in almost any large-scale program is to analyze the traffic data collected at all different points in the city, which leads to many other potential applications.
The objective
This application is related to large-scale data acquisition to try to answer several critical questions, such as:
- How much pollution is produced by road transport in a specific city?
- How much does each group of vehicles contribute to total pollution?
- How do the actual emissions from vehicles in my city compare to other similar cities?
- What is the relationship between actual vehicle emissions and the different areas of my city?
- How often do hybrid vehicles run in electric mode in each area of my city?
- How do my current emission inventories compare to actual emissions from the fleet in circulation?
How is it done?
Monitoring real-driving emissions in MANY different locations, to create a “map” of real-world traffic emissions. Because of this, we mainly use portable RSDs to deploy them on different roads and streets every few days.
As data is collected, we analyze traffic emissions by different parameters:
- Urban parameters: city district, specific site, road slope, road type, traffic intensity, etc.
- Vehicle parameters: fuel type, vehicle type, vehicle age, Euro Standard, weight, brand, model, etc.
- Traffic parameters: traffic intensity, time slot of the day, nearby traffic incidents, etc.
Some success stories
We have been doing road traffic characterizations in many cities around the world for many years. Here are some relevant examples:
