Abstract
In recent years, road space rationing policies have been increasingly applied as a traffic management solution to tackle congestion and traffic emission problems in big cities. Existing studies on the effect of traffic policy on air quality have mainly focused on the odd–even day traffic restriction policy or one-day-per-week restriction policy. There are few studies paying attention to the effect of nonlocal license plate restrictions on air quality in Shanghai. Restrictions toward nonlocal vehicles usually prohibit vehicles with nonlocal license plates from entering certain urban areas or using certain subsets of the road network (e.g., the elevated expressway) during specific time periods on workdays. To investigate the impact of such a policy on the residents’ exposure to pollutants, CO concentration and Air Quality Index (AQI) were compared during January and February in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Regression discontinuity (RD) was used to test the validity of nonlocal vehicle restriction on mitigating environmental pollution. Several conclusions can be made: (1) CO concentration was higher on ground-level roads on the restriction days than those in the nonrestriction days; (2) the extension of the restriction period exposed the commuters to high pollution for a longer time on the ground, which will do harm to them; and (3) the nonlocal vehicle restriction policy did play a role in improving the air quality in Shanghai when extending the evening rush period. Additionally, some suggestions are mentioned in order to improve air quality and passenger health and safety.
Highlights
With the rapid development and urbanization process in China, the transportation structure has been greatly changed and people rely more and more on motor vehicles instead of any other travel mode
The results showed that the restriction policy reduced the concentration of carbon monoxide (CO), PM10, NO2 and O3 more than 30% [22]
2017, to explore the effect of nonlocal vehicle restriction policy on pollutant concentration and human exposure, unnecessary factors should be removed such as the change of temperature and relative humidity due to seasonal variation
Summary
With the rapid development and urbanization process in China, the transportation structure has been greatly changed and people rely more and more on motor vehicles instead of any other travel mode. The expanded growth of motorization has contributed to a series of problems such as air pollution, oil price hikes, congestion, and growing greenhouse gas emissions [3]. Rapid motorization in Beijing has resulted in serious congestion and the average network travel speed decreasing by 3.2% and 4.9%, respectively, within the 5th Ring Road during 2010 in AM and PM peak hour [4]. Environmental Protection Agency, motor vehicles are an important source of air pollutants including carbon monoxide (CO), oxides of nitrogen (NOx ), sulfur dioxide (SO2 ), volatile organic compounds (VOC), and particulate matter (PM) [5,6,7].
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