Traffic is growing at a rapid rate in urban areas of India and management of traffic operations on limited road network has become a gigantic task to the concerned authorities. In this direction, a major study was commissioned to quantify urban travel by road and associated air pollutants coming from automobile exhausts in eight major cities of India namely Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kanpur and Agra. The main objective of this study was to develop appropriate database and techniques to estimate road traffic and air pollution loads. Air pollution loads associated with road traffic are directly proportional to the vehicle-kilometres travelled (VKT) by the vehicles in-use because air pollution caused by vehicles in a city mainly depends upon the vehicle mix and distance travelled by vehicles. For the first time, an attempt was made through this study to estimate vehicle pollution loads based on VKT considering in-use vehicles. This paper mainly describes some of the important operating characteristics of traffic and the procedure to quantify traffic and air pollution loads on major road network of the eight major cities of India. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E217099.
Samenvatting