Multimodal traffic assignment with traffic emission effects

Traffic emissions are one of the most serious issues that affect urban sustainable development. Due to the heavy pollution from cars, public transport, including electric bicycles, has been regaining its proper position. A multimodal traffic equilibrium model with emission effects (MTEEE) is presented that considers energy use per person and pollutant emissions. MTEEE is based on a general traffic equilibrium model which jointly reduces congestion and emissions in a multimodal transportation network. Aiming for control of the total amount of carbon dioxide and limiting the link concentration of carbon dioxide, the model is expressed as a mathematical programming problem by combining the concept of environmental capacity with traffic capacity as constraints. The proposed MTEEE model is solved by a particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm. Two experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the convergence properties of the PSO algorithm.