Environmental Strategies for Selecting Eco-Routing in a Small City

Abstract

This research aims to find the most ecological itineraries for urban mobility in a small city (eco-routes), where distances are rather short, but car dependence is really high. A real life citywide survey was carried out in the city of Caceres (Spain) with almost 100,000 inhabitants. Research was done on alternating routes, traffic, times of day, and weather conditions. The output of the study was to assess fuel consumption, CO 2 , and regulated pollutant emissions for different type of vehicles, routes, and drivers. The results show that in the case studied, urban roads had fewer emissions (CO 2 and pollutants) but there was an increase in the population affected by pollutants. On the contrary, bypasses reduced travel time and congestion but increased fuel consumption and emissions. Traffic conditions had a greater influence on fuel consumption in petrol vehicles than diesel ones. Therefore, there must be a balanced distribution of traffic in order to minimize congestion, and at the same time to reduce emissions and the number of people affected by harmful pollution levels. There should be a combination of regulatory measures in traffic policies in order to achieve that balance by controlling access to city centres, limiting parking spaces, pedestrianization, and lowering traffic speeds in sensitive areas.

Environmental Effects of Eco-Driving on Courier Delivery

“…Research made so far on these techniques has normally focused on non-professional drivers [21], in passenger cars on different types of road [22], vehicle or city [23]. Some research studied professional drivers, but they were not working in a courier company (Table 1).…”

Information Integration in a Smart City System—A Case Study on Air Pollution Removal by Green Infrastructure through a Vehicle Smart Routing System

“…This was explained by [22], who highlighted a nonlinear relationship between travel speed and vehicle fuel consumption and emissions. There has been a big focus on how to minimize vehicle fuel consumption/emissions [14].…”

“…Many approaches that attempt to minimise traffic emissions through eco-routing can be found in the literature and all these approaches try to reduce air pollution by minimising energy consumption [14][15][16]23]. However, more can be done not only to minimise emission and air pollution but also to use green components to reduce air pollution.…”

“…A ''least cost path'' in general means a path that minimises emissions. Efforts have been made to develop eco-routing navigation systems to minimise fuel consumption and emissions [14][15][16]. However, although in some cases the shortest distance takes the shortest time and minimum fuel consumption, it has been argued that shortest distance does not always imply shortest travel time and that the least polluting route was not always the fastest route due to factors such as congestion [15].…”

“…It was observed that with eco-routing, adopted approaches in previous work focused on reduction of fuel consumption [14][15][16] by proposing routes that would optimise energy consumption and emissions. In this work, we agree that the eco-routing practice has potential to reduce fuel consumption and harmful pollutants generated by mobility; however, we also believe that there is a necessity to remove emitted pollutants from the air.…”