Department Overview  

Copyright © 2001
Department of Transportation Studies
Texas Southern University

Assessment on Alternative Technologies and Strategies for Reducing Mobile Source Emissions

Principal Investigator:    Dr. Lei Yu

Sponsoring Agency:    City of Houston

Period:    September 1, 2001 ~ August 31, 2003

Research Background:

The City of Houston, as part of the Houston-Galveston Ozone Non-attainment Region, must comply with the current federal standards for ground-level ozone by 2007.   The city and the region are faced with potential loss of federal transportation funds, increased health costs, and other consequences if the compliance mandates are not met.  The impact of non-compliance for the city and the region is estimated to be as high as 4 billion dollars per year.  The City of Houston, under the direction of Mayor Lee P. Brown, is providing leadership on this issue to ensure that the Clean Air Challenge can be met.   In January 2000, Mayor Lee P. Brown enacted Executive Order 1-45, which called for the establishment of a comprehensive air pollution emissions reduction plan for each department of the City.  The Mayor’s Clean Air Team developed an Air Quality Plan to reduce the air pollution emissions resulting from, and associated with, City activities.  A preliminary analysis in a series of action steps taken by the Clean Air Team has found that a significant portion of the emissions came from the mobile source.  In order to meet the quantitative goals in reducing the mobile source emissions, it is necessary to assess various technologies that are designed to reduce the vehicle emissions. It is also necessary to evaluate various traffic management and control strategies that can significantly reduce vehicle emissions in the City’s traffic network.

Research Objectives:

A key objective of the proposed project is to directly link quantitative real-world emissions results to a particular fuel or pollution control technology under certain traffic and driving conditions.    This is a critical objective to the City of Houston in its effort to achieve Clean Air for several reasons.  First, the real-world measurement of vehicle emissions will make it possible to directly determine the accurate amount of emission reductions that are obtained through a particular pollution control technology or product under real-world environment.   Second, the collected data will be used to link the real-world emissions results achieved to actual dollars spent.  This will provide a Return-on-Investment (ROI) index to gauge and assess various alternative technologies and clean air strategies.   Third, the data collected in the project can also be combined with existing transportation planning models to achieve a more accurate basis for predicting the air quality impacts of transportation improvements and/or equipment upgrades and improvements.  Both USDOT and TxDOT consider the evaluation of emissions’ impacts of ongoing and future air quality improvement projects to be a key component of the success of any alternative technology program.     

Research Information

For further information about the research, please contact Dr. Lei Yu by telephone at (713) 313-7282 or by e-mail at yu_lx@tsu.edu.