How transport policy can improve the ecology of megacities

You have to pay for comfort, or rather, pay. In terms of its harmful impact on the environment, motor transport is practically equal in terms of the specific level of emissions into the atmosphere with metallurgy. Interesting experience in solving such problems through traffic management today can be found in European, Asian and Latin American cities, but many are now paying attention to the system being implemented in Russian Chelyabinsk.

Among the negative factors influencing the atmosphere of cities, exhaust gases are only part of the poisonous layer cake from the “transport shop”. In its “stuffing” there is both noise and leakage of fuels and lubricants. When it comes to tire wear, some experts put tire damage even higher than engine exhaust. Thus, according to a study by an independent emissions testing company, car exhaust pollutes the environment 2,000 times less than car tires, which form toxic substances during operation. If in numbers, emissions from tire wear average 36 mg / km, from the operation of internal combustion engines – 0.02 mg / km. Nitric oxide, lead, benzopyrene, formaldehyde, soot, sulfurous anhydrite… This is just a part of the three hundred types of harmful substances that a car emits into the air, what gets into the ground and water.

It is impossible to completely abandon the transport. How to reduce emissions while maintaining transport accessibility, many cities around the world are looking for. But sometimes you should not be fascinated by only imported examples, there are also successful examples on Russian villages.

Take, for example, the famous Ural metropolis of Chelyabinsk. For the past couple of years, its name has not left the news feeds precisely as a result of a unique transport project that is being implemented here. This is a metrotram, a project that will combine the experience and capabilities of the metro and trams.

But the metrotram is only a part of a large Chelyabinsk strategy in the transport sector. And its main essence is to reduce the pressure of urban transport on the environment. In Chelyabinsk, “green” (gas-engine) buses are now actively bought, new trams are already rolling around the city with might and main, as part of a concession agreement, the modernization of trolleybus lines has started … During the latest project, more than 72 km of a new contact network, 30 existing traction substations, a metropolis will be updated will receive 168 new trolleybuses… All this works not only for the comfort of moving around the city, but also for improving the environmental situation in a large industrial center.

In the work on transport and ecology, science does not stand aside either. And this is exactly the same feature that we talked about at the beginning of the publication. Chelyabinsk scientists have developed a special program that can calculate the emission load using CCTV cameras. The Smart City Transport project group proposed a system for monitoring and optimizing road traffic in the city, as well as controlling the level of harmful emissions produced by transport. According to Vladimir Shepelev, one of the developers, Ph.D. The system allows evaluating the effectiveness of traffic management decisions, predicting the total emissions of toxic exhaust gases from vehicles, taking into account atmospheric and climatic conditions, it will also help in regulating traffic and distributing traffic flows.

So, if modern municipal managers want to teach urban transport flows to be not only efficient, but also safe, they should first of all look for experience not on overseas shores, but in their native country, in cities like Chelyabinsk.