Improving Air Quality in Urban Recreational Areas through Smart Traffic Management

Abstract

Green parks are the only natural places for recreation in many metropolitan areas, and the European Commission is seeking to improve their air quality and, consequently, citizens’ physical and mental health. One of the recently adopted approaches is to achieve pollution abatement in these green areas by reducing nearby traffic. In this paper, we analyze the impact of reducing the traffic in nearby streets to avoid pollution by proposing two different approaches. Our goal is to improve the pollution levels in Valencia’s most significant green areas by limiting vehicular traffic flow in nearby streets. To this end, we consider two alternative solutions—a more restrictive one and a less restrictive approach—in an attempt to achieve a tradeoff between emission control and congestion avoidance. Moreover, we show how our proposal can reroute traffic throughout the city without having traffic jam problems associated with the proposed approaches. In addition, we determine how the traffic flow data and the emissions in the city vary due to the traffic restrictions that we enforce. The experimental results show that it is possible to achieve improvements in terms of pollution with both of our restriction approaches; in particular, with the partial traffic isolation model, the pollution rates in the target area decreased by 17%, which we consider an excellent initial result for the applicability and effectiveness of these methods when an adequate traffic routing system is adopted.