ENVIRONMENTAL CAPACITY OF URBAN TRANSPORT NETWORKS

Abstract

The environmental capacity of a road stretch varies as one considers different type of impacts. Environmental capacity of urban roads will restrict the maximum number vehicles plying on a particular type of road. It needs to restrain the volume of traffic in order to maintain acceptable environmental standard. Increased use of motor vehicles particularly heavy commercial traffic, two and three wheeler traffic due to increased urban activities have put up great pressure on the road network of our cities, leading to congestion and pollution. The concept of environmental capacity is a quantifiable systematic technique and it develops a relation between the environmental parameters and the transportation network features. The criteria chosen to define this relationship are noise, odor, air pollution, vibration, dirt and litter, damage to vegetation, pedestrian safety and conflicts with movement patterns on the road. The environmental capacity will-depend upon characteristics of the road itself, its design speed, no. of lanes and their widths, no. of feeding roads in the stretch, composition of the traffic especially heavy vehicles. In this dissertation, an attempt. has been made to study the various air quality models and to predict the carbon monoxide concentration has been done for all the twenty selected locations of Delhi using CALINE-4 and General Finite Line Source Model. Speed-flow curves were developed by using GFLS model, from this the environmental capacity was obtained by super imposing another speed-flow curve (enveloping curve) from CRRI. The environmental capacity in terms of traffic noise has also been calculated for the five selected locations of Delhi. The attitudinal survey of residents was done for getting the environmental score.