Traveler information provision for incident management: implications for vehicle emissions

The potential of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in alleviating nonrecurring traffic congestion was assessed, and then the resulting implications for vehicle-induced emissions in a congested city in a developing country were estimated. This work provides a blueprint for future studies on both the evaluation of ITS deployment through dynamic traffic modeling and the assessment of resulting changes in travel times and emissions. The Greater Beirut, Lebanon, area road network was used as the test bed for evaluating strategies for incident management, which was the selected ITS application for this study. A series of simulation scenarios was conducted with dynamic traffic-simulation-assignment methodology, and resulting emissions were estimated with an emission-factor model. These scenarios were used to evaluate the effect of different ITS deployment parameters--such as type of information provision (pretrip and in-vehicle) and driver compliance--on network performance and resulting emissions. Network performance measures such as travel and stop times were developed, and corresponding vehicle emissions were estimated with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and total organic carbon as indicators for each scenari