Driving segments analysis for energy and environmental impacts of worsening traffic

During the last two decades, traffic congestion in the U.S. has increased from 30% to 67% of peak period travel. Further, current research shows that measures taken within transportation systems, such as adding capacity, improving operations and managing demand, are not enough to keep congestion from growing worse. With the worsening traffic, the vehicle's fuel consumption and pollutant emissions will inevitably increase. As such, this thesis aims to quantitatively evaluate the energy and environmental impacts of worsening traffic on individual vehicles and the U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet, as well as to design feasible measures beyond transportation systems to offset theses impacts. The fuel consumption and emissions of different vehicle types under different driving situations provide the basis for analyzing the energy and environmental impacts of worsening traffic. This thesis defines the concept of "driving segments" to represent all possible driving situations which consist of vehicle speed, operation patterns and road types. For each vehicle type, its fuel consumption and emissions in different "driving segments" can be developed into a matrix by ADVISOR 2004, the vehicle simulation tool. Combining the "driving segments" vehicle performance matrices with the model for traffic congestion, the energy and environmental impacts of worsening traffic on individual vehicles can be examined.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Feng, Wen, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David H. Marks and Stephen R. Connors.

• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40300

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40300