Vehicles

Evidence of Increased Vehicle Speeding in Ohio’s Major Cities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

New paper:   Lee, J., Porr, A. and Miller, H.J. (2020) “Evidence of increased vehicle speeding in Ohio’s major cities during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Transportation Findings, June. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.12988

Abstract.  This paper compares the speeding patterns before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in three major cities in Ohio, USA: Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. Using high-resolution and real-time INRIX traffic data, we find evidence of increased speeding in all three cities. In particular, we observe an increase in the spatial extent of speeding as well as in the average level of speeding. We also find the mean differences in speeding before and after the COVID-19 outbreak are statistically significant within the study areas.

CURA report: Less traffic is leading to more speeding in Ohio’s major cities during the Coronavirus pandemic

The Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA) released a report that compared traffic data for Ohio’s three major cities for March-April 2020 versus 2019.  Less traffic during the Coronavirus crisis is leading to more speeding, especially extreme speeding.

CURA research report: Evidence Of Increased Vehicle Speeding In Ohio’s Major Cities During The Coronavirus Pandemic

This report is featured in several news sources:

  1. Ohio State News
  2. WOSU Public Media
  3. The Columbus Dispatch
  4. Columbus Underground
  5. WEWS TV5 Cleveland

Green accessibility: Estimating the environmental costs of network-time prisms

Network-time prisms are powerful measures of space-time accessibility within transportation networks.  However, they fail to capture the environmental costs of potential mobility.  In this paper, we present a method for estimating the expected energy consumption and emissions associated with network time prisms.  We also verify our method using data from instrumented vehicles moving within an experimental network-time prism in the Phoenix AZ road network.

Song, Y., Miller, H.J., Stempihar, J. and Zhou, X. (2017), “Green accessibility: Estimating the environmental costs of network-time prisms for sustainable transportation planning,” Journal of Transport Geography, 64, 109-119.

Abstract.  Accessibility, or the ease to participate in activities and obtain resources in a given environment, is crucial for evaluating transportation systems. Greater accessibility is often achieved by increasing individuals’ potential mobility. However, potential mobility, if realized by motorized modes, can also generate negative environmental impacts such as fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While the negative environmental impacts of greater mobility are acknowledged, there has been a lack of research to validate those impacts using empirical data, especially considering variations in individuals’ mobility levels. This paper presents a method for estimating the expected environmental costs of accessibility represented by a network-time prism (NTP). A NTP delimits all accessible locations within a network and the available time for an individual to present at each location given a scheduled trip origin and destination, a time budget and the maximum achievable speeds along network edges. Estimating the expected environmental costs of a NTP involves three steps: (1) semi-Markov techniques to simulate the probabilities to move along network edges at given times; (2) the speed profiles for reachable edges, and (3) a cost function that translates speeds into environmental impacts. We focus on air quality and employ the motor vehicle emission simulator MOVESLite to estimate the CO2 emissions at both the edge and prism levels. We calibrate and validate the methods for experimental NTPs defined within the Phoenix, AZ, USA road and highway network using vehicles instrumented with GPS-enabled onboard diagnostic devices (OBD). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through two scenarios and investigate the impact of changes in mobility levels on the expected CO2 emissions associated with the experimental NTPs.

Keywords: Space-time accessibility; Network-time prism; Emissions