Benchmarking mobility emissions
In the worldwide scenario, the direct consequence of the climate change due to the global warming caused also by the air pollution and consequent production of the green house gases can be seen: any effort producing the reduction of such pollution sources goes towards the sustainability of human activities.
The comprehension of such mechanism at the various policy levels – from transnational to local – and the worthwhile incidence of the traffic polluting source in urban agglomerations is arising attention towards the development of careful traffic control policy. The continuous growing mobility demand has caused in fact, in the years, a substantial growth in circulating vehicles creating congestion and increase of emission and pollution especially in urban areas.
The settlement of a mobility indicator in order to describe the traffic condition in European urban agglomerates is coming as direct consequences of these needs, and it could provide experts and policy makers with a helpful tool in urban planning work. This mobility index could be used for traffic and emissions control as well as to inform the city user about the status of the mobility in such urban environments. The mobility indicator will be developed in a tight cooperation with researchers.
The mobility indicator is an extremely synthetic representation of a phenomenon that is, instead, really complex. Its main aims are a) to allow for an immediate comparison between the levels of mobility in different cities in an unique and easy understandable way and b) to raise the awareness on the importance of reducing mobility generated emissions for being mobile and live in a healthy city. The main input to calculate the mobility indicator will come from traffic measurements, with special attention to travel time, speed and flows that could be monitored in the different cities with any type of technology, according to the availability of ITS tools.
Once the mobility indicator is developed and tested in a number of European Cities it will become available for application throughout Europe.