Remote Sensing of Vehicle Emissions - Helping to Bust two of the Great Urban Air Quality Myths?
Effective management of vehicle emissions in any urban environment is a challenge. Regardless of whether a person owns a car or not, they have opinion as to who the worst polluters are and whether the situation is improving.
Two of the most common beliefs voiced by motorists and policy makers alike are that:
• Vehicle emissions are inversely proportional to driver income
• “Business as Usual” (BaU) vehicle technology trends by themselves will solve everything
But are these urban facts or myths? This paper uses “real-world” vehicle emission data to answer these questions.
Remote sensing was undertaken in Auckland, New Zealand in 2003 and 2005 to measure exhaust emissions of a large number of vehicles in “real world” situations. In total, the two campaigns generated datasets for over 90,000 vehicles, from which emissions were analysed and profiled.
For each vehicle in the 2005 dataset, the owner’s address was assigned a social deprivation index (SDI), based on census data, enabling a match between socio-economic and environmental indicators. This database has been used to indicate the potential implications, particularly for low income households, of policies which target high emitting vehicles.
Between 2003 and 2005, very few new vehicle emissions management policies were introduced in New Zealand thereby providing the opportunity to test the fleet emissions impacts of “BaU” technology trends alone. Consequently, the 2005 data have been compared to the 2003 data to quantify any observable reductions. The influence of BaU technology trends on achieving of air quality management goals is discussed.