A Health Impact Assessment of Traffic Restrictions during Madrid NO2 Episode

Abstract

One of the first decisions to improve the urban air quality during an air pollution episode is to apply traffic parking and access restrictions to try to decrease the amount of private vehicles driving in the city but their the effectiveness of the decisions must be evaluated before taking them. The health impact assessment tool of this work can help to the decision makers because it examines the citizen’s health impacts of the applied measurements. The modelling system has been applied for a NO2 episode in Madrid city during December, 2016. The core of the system is the EMIMO-WRF/Chem air quality modeling system that simulates the air quality concentrations every grid cell of 1 km by 1 km and traffic emissions are calculated using data from a microscopic traffic model. The pollutant concentrations are inputs to the health impact module, which uses concentration–response functions. Two simulations were designed: “REAL” including traffic restrictions and “BAU” representing what would happen if no action were taken. The differences between the two simulations (BAU-REAL) give us the contribution of traffic restriction measures to improve the citizen’s health. The results show that the measures taken in this specific case were not sufficiently effective compared to the effort to reduce traffic.