Estimating Instantaneous Vehicle Emissions

What is it about?

Road transportation emissions have increased in the last few decades and have been the primary source of pollutants in urban areas with ever-growing populations. In this context, it is important to have effective measures to monitor road emissions in regions. Creating an emissions inventory over a region that can map road emissions based on vehicle trips can be helpful. In this work, we show that it is possible to use raw GPS data to estimate vehicle-related levels of pollution in a region. By transforming the data using feature engineering and calculating the vehicle-specific power (VSP) as well as various specific pollutants by using a microscopic emissions model, we show the areas with higher emissions levels made by a fleet of taxis in Porto, Portugal.

Featured Image

Photo by Ferdinand Stöhr on Unsplash

Photo by Ferdinand Stöhr on Unsplash

Why is it important?

A quarter of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) can be traced back to transport, with road transportation representing the greatest share, measuring up to 72% in 2019. Unlike many sectors that have shown significant reductions in these emissions by implementing climate and energy policies over the last decades, transport GHG emissions have increased by more than 33% between 1990 and 2019 and road transport emissions by almost 28%. According to all existing policy measures, transport carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are projected to be 3.5% higher in 2030 than it was in 1990 and to fall by only 22% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. For other emission pollutants, the projected growth is similar posing a big concern for humanity and planet Earth.

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