Abstract
Exploring the system-level interactions within the modern urban transportation system, factors such as human health, vehicle exhaust pollution, air quality, emerging personal transportation technologies, and local weather events, are increasingly expedient considering the growth of human population centers projected in the 21st century. Pollutants often accumulate to unhealthy concentrations during winter inversion events such as those that commonly occur in Utah’s Salt Lake valley and other mountainous regions. This work examines the degree to which replacing conventionally powered vehicles with electric vehicles (EV) could reduce the near-road accumulation of criteria pollutants under various degrees of inversion depth and wind speed. Vehicle emissions data are combined with inversion and wind factors to determine changes in the Air Quality Index, and a first-order estimate of the cost required to build an EV charging infrastructure to support a given EV adoption scenario is also derived. Results are presented in the form of multiple Pareto frontiers and a simplified cost–benefit formula that inform potential public and private EV charging infrastructure investments to drive the EV adoption that would result in optimal air quality improvements during average weather and winter inversion events.
Highlights
The smolderings of an electric vehicle (EV) revolution evident in the early 2000s have, in recent years, grown into a fast pace roll-out of dozens of new electric vehicles (EVs) models sporting increasingly longer range batteries, class-leading performance statistics, and state-of-theart technologies that promise a future of fully autonomous vehicles and emissions-free transportation
In order to achieve the project’s goal of modeling the effect of EV populations on air quality improvement near major highways and the costs associated with supporting those EV populations, data were acquired from repositories created or sponsored by the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), the Utah State Tax Commission [44], the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [45], the United States Department of Energy (DOE) [46,47], the Ford Motor Company [48], and from various academic and database sources [36,49,50]
The vehicle miles traveled (VMT) data were taken from a 32 km segment of Interstate 15 that directly transects several of the major population centers in the greater Salt Lake City metropolitan area
Summary
The smolderings of an electric vehicle (EV) revolution evident in the early 2000s have, in recent years, grown into a fast pace roll-out of dozens of new EV models sporting increasingly longer range batteries, class-leading performance statistics, and state-of-theart technologies that promise a future of fully autonomous vehicles and emissions-free transportation. Criteria pollution concentrated near human populations is responsible for a variety of pulmonary health problems, including acute bronchitis, pneumonia, and early onset asthma [4,5] These effects are primarily seen in individuals exposed to bad air over a long period of time or in at risk groups such as children and the elderly [6,7]. The negative health effects associated with prolonged exposure to particulate matter have been observed across multiple geographic regions [9] All of these studies should cause concern among policy makers and local stakeholders as increasing numbers of vehicles traverse roadways and urbanization continues near and around major transportation thoroughfares
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