Development of real world driving cycles at Delhi Bus Rapid Transit corridor and air pollution scenario

Abstract

Real world driving cycles represent traffic behaviour and it is an important element of emission model. Although Indian driving cycles have been developed to test emission and fuel consumption but they are based on constant speed, acceleration not covering heterogeneous traffic composition. Therefore, in this study bus driving cycle have been attempted to estimate emission and fuel consumptions including the changes in the driving characteristic of other vehicles as well. In this paper driving cycles are derived at Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor of Delhi for buses, cars and motorcycles using real world driving data in both operational and non-operational stretch. The results show that average running speed of buses in operational corridors are higher. However, due to introduction of BRT, there was reduction in speed for cars and motorcycles because of lesser road space availability in contrast to the traffic volume. Even chances of accidents are lower because of speed reduction. The changed speed pattern also affect the modal shifting from cars, motorcycles to buses resulting lower emission along the corridor. In this paper two emission scenarios are developed by assuming 5% and 10% modal shift of commuter from cars and motorcycles to buses due to higher operational efficiency in BRT system. We found, that there was decline of 4% and 9% emission for CO and HC in comparison to current business as usual scenario, if such a shift is happened. The results indicate that BRT is environment friendly sustainable transportation to reduce pollution. This approach well represents real world traffic behaviour in heterogeneous condition for sustainable transport.