Some characteristic infrastructures of city roads, as like as underpasses, roundabouts and crossroads equipped with traffic lights, are indispensable indeed to fluidify car traffic through the city but often could transform themselves in environmental traps on account of air polluting substances that such facilities could concentrate in the air. For this reason people believe that City Plane of Road Traffic (P.U.T. in Italian language) must provide itself with a preliminary and pertinent "Study of Environmental Impact" (S.E.I.) to avoid health hazards to city-dwellers. In this way the S.E.I. must be able both to forecast the limit of car traffic volume in transit compatible with the limits of the pollution of air established by environmental laws and to forecast too the kinds of control technics such as to reduce air pollution in the case of traffic volume overcoming the forecast values. To prove the possibility of health risks, people carried out a three months campaign of measures of pollution (CO and PM10 tracer substances) taking into account one underpass, one roundabout and one crossroad, all of them representative of day trend of traffic in Catania city. The paper shows the results of performed tests and some first conclusions. For the covering abstract see ITRD E120462.
Abstract