Health Impact Assessment of a Predicted Air Quality Change by Moving Traffic from an Urban Ring Road into a Tunnel. The Case of Antwerp, Belgium.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The Antwerp ring road has a traffic density of 300,000 vehicles per day and borders the city center. The 'Ringland project' aims to change the current 'open air ring road' into a 'filtered tunneled ring road', putting the entire urban ring road into a tunnel and thus filtering air pollution. We conducted a health impact assessment (HIA) to quantify the possible benefit of a 'filtered tunneled ring road', as compared to the 'open air ring road' scenario, on air quality and its long-term health effects.

Materials and methods

We modeled the change in annual ambient PM2.5 and NO2 concentrations by covering 15 kilometers of the Antwerp ring road in high resolution grids using the RIO-IFDM street canyon model. The exposure-response coefficients used were derived from a

SUBMITTER: Van Brusselen D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4863966 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature