Motor vehicle emissions contain pollutants that contribute to outdoor air pollution. An examination of the peer-reviewed literature shows that there are many previous analyses that estimate the economic costs of congestion based on fuel and time wasted, but that these studies don’t include the costs of the potential public health impacts. Sitting in traffic leads to higher tailpipe emissions which everyone is exposed to, and the economic costs of those exposures have not been explored.
Authors: Jonathan I. Levy, Jonathan Buonocore and Katherine von Stackelberg
Download this Report from the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, or view the full article in Environmental Health online.