Modification of QUEWZ Model to Estimate Fuel Costs and Tailpipe Emissions

Traffic congestion created by urban highway construction and rehabilitation activity imposes substantial cost burdens on highway users. In their attempts to quantify and predict such costs, transportation planners have customarily relied on computer models that focus principally on vehicle operating cost and time delay increases. Increasingly, however, planners are recognizing that highway users themselves can inflate system costs–particularly those costs associated with increases in tailpipe emissions. Thus, the challenge to highway planners is to model these effects so that a full range of cost effects can be used at the planning stages of a traffic engineering project. The preliminary results of a study undertaken to modify an existing work zone model–QUEWZ–to report net increases in energy and tailpipe pollution associated with various traffic-handling scenarios within construction zones are given.