Assessing the environmental performances of urban roundabouts using the VSP methodology and AIMSUN

Abstract

In line with globally shared environmental sustainability goals, the shift towards citizen-friendly mobility is changing the way people move through cities and road user behaviour. Building a sustainable road transport requires design knowledge to develop increasingly green road infra-structures and monitoring the environmental impacts from mobile crowdsourced data. In this view, the paper presents an empirically based methodology that integrates the vehicle-specific power (VSP) model and microscopic traffic simulation (AIMSUN) to estimate second-by-second vehicle emissions at urban roundabouts. The distributions of time spent in each VSP mode from instantaneous vehicle trajectory data gathered in the field via smartphone were the starting point of the analysis. The versatility of AIMSUN in calibrating the model parameters to better reflect the field-observed speed-time trajectories and to enhance the estimation accuracy was assessed. The conversion of an existing roundabout within the sample into a turbo counterpart was also made as an attempt to confirm the reproducibility of the proposed procedure. The results shed light on new opportunities in the environmental performance evaluation of road units when changes in design or operation should be considered within traffic management strategies and highlighted the potential of the smart approach in collecting big amounts of data through digital communities.