Vehicular fleet characterisation and assessment of the on-road mobile source emission inventory of a Latin American intermediate city

Abstract

The management of urban mobile-source emissions is nowadays a challenging topic. This paper describes a comprehensive and practical analysis of the vehicular fleet characterisation and the 2018 on-road mobile source emission inventory for Bahía Blanca (Argentina), a medium-size Latin American city. An exhaustive segmentation of the vehicle fleet was done to obtain more real results from the emission inventory carried out by COPERT software. Results for 2018, allow us to conclude that motorcycles were the main source of CO, NMVOC, CO2 and CH4. While, light commercial vehicles were the ones that emitted the most amount of NOx. Finally, it was concluded that the polluting emissions observed in 2013 are higher than the 2018's ones, in spite of the growth of the vehicular fleet (12.45% in 2018 respect to 2013). This may mainly be due to the incorporation of a new, more efficient emission control technology in vehicular fleet of 2018. However, these improvements result in increased GHGs emissions, which is still a challenge in this area. Finally, the main trends for vehicle flow and emissions detected in 2020 are presented.