Estimating pollutant emissions from aggregated traffic variables: the influence of data sources and sampling methods

Overview & Synopsis

This paper investigates the sensibility of pollutant estimations to errors when determining the traffic states at large urban scale. Two key figures are required to estimate traffic-related pollutants at this scale: the mean speed with the considered region and the travel production. Loop detectors and probes can be used to determine these variables. In this paper, the estimation methods for these variables and the influence of the sampling rate will be questioned. The analysis revealed that (i) probes data provide accurate results even for low sampling rate and that (ii) the precision of travel production's estimate is mainly linked to the precision of the sampling ratio's assessment. The latter will be approximated combining information from probes and loops.