Articolo in rivista, 2022, ENG, 10.1038/s41893-022-00903-x

Gross polluters and vehicle emissions reduction

Bohm M.; Nanni M.; Pappalardo L.

Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy; CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy; CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy

Vehicle emissions produce an important share of a city's air pollution, with a substantial impact on the environment and human health. Traditional emission estimation methods use remote sensing stations, missing the full driving cycle of vehicles, or focus on a few vehicles. We have used GPS traces and a microscopic model to analyse the emissions of four air pollutants from thousands of private vehicles in three European cities. We found that the emissions across the vehicles and roads are well approximated by heavy-tailed distributions and thus discovered the existence of gross polluters, vehicles responsible for the greatest quantity of emissions, and grossly polluted roads, which suffer the greatest amount of emissions. Our simulations show that emissions reduction policies targeting gross polluters are far more effective than those limiting circulation based on an uninformed choice of vehicles. Our study contributes to shaping the discussion on how to measure emissions with digital data.

Nature sustainability

Keywords

Traffic emissions, Fuel consumption, Urban, Congestion, Patterns, Travel

CNR authors

Nanni Mirco, Pappalardo Luca

CNR institutes

ISTI – Istituto di scienza e tecnologie dell'informazione "Alessandro Faedo"

ID: 468812

Year: 2022

Type: Articolo in rivista

Creation: 2022-06-30 16:35:22.000

Last update: 2022-07-14 15:06:00.000

External IDs

CNR OAI-PMH: oai:it.cnr:prodotti:468812

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-022-00903-x

Scopus: 2-s2.0-85131546854

ISI Web of Science (WOS): 000808429700004