Implementation of Air Pollution Control Policy based on Traffic Restrictions in Downtowns (in Developing Cities)

Traffic air pollution is one of the important problems in most major worldwide cities, which is caused by the vehicles congestion. Continuous increase in the number of vehicles leads to many problems in the big cities. This problem inflicts a lot of complications and expenses. One of the biggest concerns of urban managers is to apply policies and procedures for managing and controlling the harmful effects of pollution and to improve urban air quality. The central zones of the city are very important in land uses and travel attraction. Improving the traffic in urban areas and promoting the use of public transportation systems are the aims of this urban management policy which also helps to reduce air pollution. Optimal utilization of network capacity without huge and time consuming costs, using only the managerial tools and strategies, is the aim of travel demand management in reducing traffic problems. Among these strategies is applying some restrictions to the movement of vehicles on certain streets of the city. Thus, in this paper, a model was proposed to introduce a congestion charging scheme and then the effects of this model on the network performance factors, were evaluated. The proposed model is analyzed through simulation by EMME/2 for initiating congestion charging scheme in Tabriz. As the result of this study, the effects of this project to improve traffic management and air quality in the city center were studied.

Keywords:

Vehicle Emission , Traffic Assignment , Demand , Trip Matrix , Congestion Charging Scheme