01515425

Component

With the growing interest in mitigating climate change primarily GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and criteria pollutants from transportation sources, and in congestion pricing strategies to reduce congestion, research is needed to examine the environmental impacts of managed lanes (MLs). The concept of MLs is an increasingly accepted countermeasure that aims at making the most efficient use of limited access facilities. However, the need to accurately quantify emissions on ML is essential. Estimating vehicle emissions based on second-by-second vehicle operation creates a significant motivation to integrate microscopic traffic simulation models with emissions models to improve accuracy. This paper presents a detailed examination of vehicular emissions on ML versus general use lanes (GUL) on Interstate 4, a limited access urban highway corridor in Orlando, Florida. The corridor is modeled using VISSIM coupled with EPA’s latest mobile source emissions model MOVES2010. The VISSIM/MOVES integration was used to estimate emissions. The paper analyzes how existing (EX) and ML/GUL scenarios for modeling project-level impacts affect emissions results with respect to CO, NOx and CO2. The results demonstrated that, although the induced demand on GUL, number of merge, diverge areas and weaving sections between GUL and ML seem to result in an increase of emissions, the implementation of managed lanes reduces the overall network emissions as well as emission rates when compared to the EX scenario. Also, obtaining accurate and comprehensive operating mode distributions are essential in the emission estimation process. Specifically, emission rates are found to be highly sensitive to braking, idling, deceleration and the associated acceleration cycles.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC20 Transportation and Air Quality.

01503729

14-5543

English

14p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Case studies; Greenhouse gases; Managed lanes; Pollutants; Traffic simulation

Interstate 4; Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; VISSIM (Computer model)

Orlando (Florida)

Environment; Highways; I15: Environment

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-5543

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 3:56PM