Internal and External Costs of Motor Vehicle Pollution

Mengying Cui and David Levinson ()
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David Levinson: School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney

No 168, Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group

Abstract: On-road emissions, a dominant source of urban air pollution, damage human health. Emissions increase air pollution intake (and damage health) of travelers (internal costs), and of non-travelers (external costs). This research constructs a framework modeling the microscopic production of emission cost from the vehicle and link level and applies it to a metropolitan road network. It uses project-level Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) simulations to model link-specific on-road emissions, and then employs the RLINE dispersion model to estimate on- and off-road concentrations of pollutants from vehicles. The internal and external emission costs are measured accordingly by counting the health damage costs of travelers and general population because of exposure. The framework is applied to the Minneapolis-St. Paul (Twin Cities) Metropolitan Area as a proof-of-concept. The estimates show that highways have higher emission concentrations because of higher traffic flow, but that the internal and external emission costs per vehicle kilometer traveled are lower. The emission costs that commuters impose on others greatly exceeds that which they bear. This modeling process is replicable for planners and practitioners assessing emission costs in other regions.

Keywords: Route choice; Traffic assignment; Shortest path; Pollution; Emissions; Exposure; Intake (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 Q56 R41 R42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-tre and nep-ure
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Published in Transportation Research Record Vol 2674, Issue 11, 2020

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https://hdl.handle.net/11299/189881 First version, 2017; Second version, 2020 (application/pdf)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nex:wpaper:greenestpath

DOI: 10.1177/0361198120941502

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