Identification of emission hotspots in roundabouts corridors

• Vehicular emissions were characterized along a corridors with roundabouts.
• Field measurements were used to assess speed, acceleration and emissions.
• Downstream segments are the emission hotspots when roundabouts are equally spaced.
• Circulating areas are the emission hotspots when roundabouts are unevenly spaced.
• Entry deflection angle has a slight impact in the spatial distribution of emissions.

This study describes a methodology to quantify and characterize the vehicular emissions of functionally interdependent roundabouts at a corridor level. Corridor segments include those upstream of each roundabout, the circulating area, downstream of the roundabout as well as midblock sub-segments between adjacent roundabouts. The main purpose of the study is to identify the locations along the corridors where emissions tend to be consistently high. These locations are termed “Emission Hotspots”. The methodology is applied to four existing roundabout corridors in San Diego (California) and Avon (Colorado) in the United States, and in Mealhada and Chaves (Portugal). An extensive sample of second-by-second speed traces is available for these four corridors with roundabouts.The analysis shows that when roundabouts are fairly spaced and have similar geometric design features, no significant differences are observed between emissions of roundabouts located in the corridor. In such cases, the downstream sub-segments are the emission hotspots both in absolute terms (overall contribution on total emissions is higher than 34%) and per unit distance (22% higher than the average corridor value). When roundabouts are unequally spaced the highest emissions hotspots (more than 9% above the average corridor value) are found at the circulating area sub-segments. The results also demonstrate that the entry deflection angle has a slight impact on the spatial distribution of emissions especially in the case of closely spaced roundabouts.