Abstract
Carpooling is a mobility concept that has been showing promising results in reducing single occupancy use of private cars, which prompted many institutions, namely universities, to implement carpooling platforms to improve their networks sustainability. Nowadays, currently under a pandemic crisis, public transportation must be used with limitations regarding the number of occupants to prevent the spread of the virus and commuters are turning even more to private cars to perform their daily trips. Carpooling under a set of precaution rules is a potential solution to help commuters perform their daily trips while respecting COVID-19 safety recommendations. This research aimed to develop an analysis of the road traffic and emission impacts of implementing carpooling, with social distancing measures, in three university campus networks through microscopic traffic simulation modeling and microscopic vehicular exhaust emissions estimation. Results indicate that employing carpooling for groups of up to three people to safely commute from their residence area to the university campus has the potential to significantly reduce pollutant emissions (reductions of 5% and 7% in carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides can be obtained, respectively) within the network while significantly improving road traffic performance (average speed increased by 7% and travel time reduced by 8%).
Highlights
University campuses can be viewed as small cities since they are defined by their own community with a specific set of behaviors and internal circulation networks, which are connected to a corresponding city network and are key traffic attractors and generators [1,2]
During the period of simulation, the carpooling scenario was not able to have a statistically significant impact on the network regarding vehicle exhaust emissions and road traffic performance. This network is characterized by lower traffic volumes, which explains why no significant impacts were obtained; considering that the simulation period corresponds to one hour, the results indicate that interesting outcomes can be achieved with the implementation of carpooling in this network
University campuses are similar to small cities and serve as perfect case studies for assessing sustainability measures to be implemented and have the execution details retouched to improve the adoption procedure for greater case studies
Summary
University campuses can be viewed as small cities since they are defined by their own community with a specific set of behaviors and internal circulation networks, which are connected to a corresponding city network and are key traffic attractors and generators [1,2]. University campuses present as good case studies for evaluating sustainable mobility solutions that can potentially reduce road traffic negative impacts [1]. The evaluation and analysis of vehicular exhaust emissions and road traffic performance have been extensively addressed by the research community through field measurement campaigns and the application of estimation frameworks, namely, the overall network emission impacts and road traffic performance in different network sizes and with different fleet compositions [3,4].
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