Reduction of the polluting emissions in urban areas acting on the transport systems: evaluation methods for the strategic planning

In this paper a traffic plan is presented, developed for the city of Cosenza, a midsize city in the South of Italy. An analysis was conducted preliminarily on the actual mobility system, which underlined the present critical points. Multiple scenarios were introduced, bringing into account different time horizons, each characterized by infrastructural and mobility government actions. The planned interventions consist in the regulation of circulation and parking, in the development of public transport and in the development of new roads and parking blocks. The adopted actions are evaluated simulating, by the use of suitable quantitative techniques, the functionality of the transport network, in the different action and demand evolution scenarios. The traffic flow conditions of private vehicles were estimated on the links of the network, (flows, speed and congestion levels); the flow conditions of the public transport vehicles were simulated separately, on the assumption that the latter run on protected or separate lanes, in particular on roads were the risks of congestion are higher. For the different scenarios, in function of the flow characteristics, the total emissions of different pollutants (CO, NOx, etc.) were calculated separately for private and public transport, in order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed actions. A financial and an economic evaluation on the effects of the different proposed actions was possible by the application of the results of the study.