Method for Characterizing Traffic Calming Measures to Evaluate Their Impact on Pollution

Traffic calming measures combat speeding and other unsafe behavior by drivers, proving their effectiveness in reducing the frequency and severity of accidents. However, some measures include road results that cause a negative impact on the environment. The objective of this work is to analyze the repercussion of reducing the speed of a vehicle on exhaust emissions and fuel consumption (FC) when driving over a bump. To do this, this article presents a procedure based on two methods applied to RDVs. The first is based on an application that measures the physical impact on a vehicle from acceleration data taken with the IMU of a smartphone in a direction perpendicular to the chassis. The second is aimed at inferring the increase in emissions and FC by taking the speed-time profile of a path because of decelerating, approaching and moving away from the bump. The experimentation carried out with a standard two-passenger vehicle circulating on a section of road with RDV with a trapezoidal section and with a circular section in front of the same section without RDV found a significant physical impact in both scenarios, resulting in an increase in CO emissions, HC, NOX, CO2 and FC associated with speed decreases of only 20 km/h and 10 km/h, respectively. This demonstrates the generalization and usefulness of the proposed method for the study of the increase in emissions and fuel consumption of different «traffic calming» measures on the road. Keywords: Fuel Consumption, Pollutant Emissions, Impact, Speed Reducer, Acceleration