You are here
BREATHE: Bridging Realms for Equitable Assessment of TRAP Health Effects
This project will link and extend several models to create a framework for full-chain assessment of transportation systems and impacts of traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) on population health in the San Francisco Bay Area. The investigators will evaluate impacts of three policy scenarios — federal/California long-term transportation electrification, telecommuting impact from COVID-19, and a community-led scenario — on exposure to TRAP and associated mortality and morbidity outcomes, including environmental justice disparities.
Exposure to traffic-related air pollution (TrAP) poses risks to human health. Despite recent advancements in infrastructure and technology, the magnitude of consequent health benefits remains unclear, partly because current models lack the sufficient resolution to capture the complex dynamics and evolution of transportation systems.
We developed BEAM CORE1, an agent-based transportation framework that simulates detailed activities for passengers and freight. This model integrates transportation, land use, demographics, and vehicle ownership at multiple spatiotemporal scales. By validating key emission modeling parameters like link-specific VMT and speed patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, we demonstrate its adaptability for integration with InMAP2 and AERMOD3 to evaluate health implications of changes in transportation systems considering future vehicle technology and emerging travel trends.
BEAM CORE 2018 baseline has been calibrated, evaluated1 and integrated with EMFAC20214 and fleet inputs from US-VIUS 20215 and TITAN’s techno-economic analysis6. Compared to 2018, emissions from MHD exhaust and break/tire wear drop by 87%, 75%, and 56% for NOx, PM2.5, and PM10, respectively, by 2050, assuming that 30% of trucks are battery-powered, 15% are hydrogen fuel cell-powered, and the remainder are diesel with nearly universal adoption of particle filters and NOx reduction catalysts. Additionally, initial results from integration of InMAP’s ISRM2 indicate that emerging travel trends led to notable health benefits through improved air quality overall, especially in urban centers and Silicon Valley areas, due to reduced PM2.5 concentrations.
The agent-based transportation model BEAM CORE improves the specificity in estimating TrAP impacts. Future work will integrate InMAP2, AERMOD3 and exposure-response relationships from the HEI Traffic Review7. Applying this first-of-its-kind integrated pipeline to the Bay Area population will enable us to explore pathways between transportation system changes and health impacts. As an open-source solution built primarily on open data, BEAM CORE can be adapted for any region using local data.
