UC Irvine

Due to heavy congestion and air pollutants emissions from the increase in container trucks traveling on the I-710, Caltrans and Metro have been looking into viable alternatives for solving these problems. The heavy health burden on residents of the areas surrounding the I-710 has been a cause for concern to these agencies for some time. In this study, I rely on microscopic traffic simulation and on operating modes (OpModes) lookup tables from MOVES to estimate changes in congestion and in emissions of various air pollutants (including nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM)) resulting from the creation of electrified truck lanes on I-710. This alternative was tested for four scenarios corresponding to different percentage of electrified heavy-duty trucks in the I-710 corridor. My results show that creating electrified lanes would slightly reduce congestion in terms of average overall network speed. I also found a substantial reduction in the emissions of several air pollutants by port-related heavy duty trucks, which ranged from 44% to 94% in the scenarios considered. Overall, the reduction in emission possible by the electrification of the freight corridor is a significant improvement but as proposed, the electrification of the I-710 would also create additional traffic problems. This suggests that planning models (such as TransCad) are not sufficient to properly evaluate preliminary designs of freeway changes.