Modelling the fuel consumption and pollutant emissions of the urban bus fleet of the city of Madrid

An integrated methodology to estimate the emissions of automotive vehicles is proposed in this work, with application to the vehicle fleet of Madrid Municipal Transport Company. The fleet composed of 2000 buses and 20 different types, operating 167 routes providing a service to the whole of the city of Madrid, with 3.165 million inhabitants and over 404 million passengers in the year 2014. The results of the model have been validated by calculating the fuel consumption and comparing them with the actual consumption, as this is the only data that can be used by taking estimations that are external to the model. The errors found were small and acceptable. Thus, the approach of this work has two features: it uses both measured transport activity data and vehicle activity data with specific emissions models for the calculation of consumption and emissions for a bus fleet based on an urban area; it also has two outcomes: it provides useful information for understanding where and how air pollutants are originated and it is a tool for designing intervention measures.