Professor Jane Lin developing a tool for project-level air quality analysis
Transportation is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution. When construction projects are underway, it can add to the emissions problem with disrupted/slow-down traffic and pollution from the construction activities.
To keep air pollution in check for public health protection, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets the air quality standards and designates the attainment status at the county scale. It provides a suite of regulatory tools for environmental impact assessment for a variety of projects including transportation projects. However, the tools can have a steep learning curve and are labor and computationally intensive to use. In an effort to simplify the process, the Illinois Center of Transportation (ICT)/Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) awarded CME Professor Jane Lin with a new grant for the project titled “Development of a Project Scale Air Quality Screening Tool.”
“This project is basically to create a screening tool to get a watered-down version of emission and air dispersion modeling for any transportation projects,” said Lin, who is the director of the Sustainable Transportation Research Group at UIC. “The analysis tool is intended to provide an efficient way to forecast project-level emissions in response to applicable current and future air quality regulations.”
If the traffic is going slower there may be a long line backing up and the slow-moving traffic usually generates more pollution as well as the exposure potential to the construction workers and nearby residents. The environmental regulation by the EPA looks at projects to see if it is going to be considered a project of air quality concern if it significantly worsens the air quality.
“For some of the borderline projects when the air quality impact is not clear, then the idea is to have a screening model that’s a simpler watered-down version of the tools that EPA provides. They can run it quickly and see if it has a red flag or not. If the tool says it’s way under the limit for air quality, then they don’t have to run the whole model,” she said.
IDOT is particularly interested in projects like traffic intersections, interchanges, and highway main line traffic disruption including lane closure and traffic slowdown due to construction activities and quantifying the associated emissions and air pollution impacts.
By having this new modeling tool as the first step to screen out projects that are not necessary to go through full-scale EPA modeling, agencies like IDOT can save time, money, and ensure they are meeting – or possible reducing – the air-quality standards set by the EPA.