Modeling Toll Plaza Queueing and Air Quality

1. Modeling Toll Plaza Queueing and Air Quality Investigators: Jane Lin Department of Civil and Materials Engineering & Institute of Environmental Science and Policy Funded by Illinois State Toll Highway Authority • Illinois Tollway’s 5-year 5-billion-dollar conversion of existing toll plazas to open road tolling (ORT) system will have large impact on regional highway traffic • Lack of analytical tools to model toll plaza queueing phenomena, and also scientifically challenging because of both physical design and uncertainty of human decision procedure • Potential air quality, health exposure, social and economic impacts • Step 1: Development of stochastic toll plaza queueing models with probabilistic lane selection • Step 2: Calibration using field observations and traffic simulation model • Step 3: Estimation of vehicle emissions from queued traffic using EPA’s emission model at user-specified spatial and temporal resolutions • Step 4: Prediction of pollution concentrations at given distance to road center line • Step 5: Estimation of population exposure in GIS • Project started in early 2005 • Final product of this project is a windows-based, user-friendly toll plaza air quality model with sound queueing algorithm and improved pollution prediction method • This model can be used to quantify the impact of (ORT) on toll plaza traffic, air quality and even human exposure • Future goals include improving the model algorithm in heavy traffic, developing a microscopic toll plaza queueing simulation model, and assessing ORT’s social, economic, and environmental impacts at the regional level.