A bottom-up methodology to estimate vehicle emissions for the Beijing urban area Original Research Article

Vehicle exhaust emissions have posed a serious threat in recent years to the urban air quality of Beijing. It is necessary to accurately estimate the magnitude and distribution of these emissions in order to reduce the uncertainty of local scale air quality modeling assessment. This paper provides a bottom-up approach by combining vehicle emission factors and vehicle activity data from a travel demand model estimated at the grid level to generate vehicle emissions data for the Beijing urban area in 2005. In that year, vehicular emissions of HC, CO and NOx were respectively 13.33 × 104, 100.02 × 104 and 7.55 × 104 tons. The grid-based emissions were also compared with the vehicular emission inventory developed by macro-scale approach. It shows this bottom-up approach can result in better estimates of the levels and spatial distribution of vehicle emissions than the macro-scale method that relies on more average and aggregated information.