Journal of Earth Sciences and Geotechnical Engineering

Reducing Freight Transport Pollution by using electric vehicles

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• Abstract

   

  To mitigate the pollution of road transport, several cities in Europe have implemented ‘Low Emission Zones’ (LEZ). In order to plan the future of such questions for the Paris area, and to assess their impacts on traffic and air pollution, LEZ scenarios have been defined for freight vehicles: a ‘Business as Usual (BAU) scenario, a LEZ scenario, in which only the most recent vehicles are authorized, and two ‘electric scenarios, in which only electric vehicles can enter the zone limited by the motorway A86, an area of 385 km² for about 4.8 million inhabitants. The difference between the two electric scenarios is related to the hypothesis on the evolution of the technologies: In the first scenario, Diesel trucks can be replaced by equivalent electric powered trucks of the same payload. In the second scenario, only the vehicles with a payload below 5 tons could be replaced by the electric equivalent. So, every vehicle with a load over 5 tons has to be replaced by several smaller vehicles in the LEZ area. This communication follows the RETMIF project (Reduction of Emissions from Freight Transport in the Greater Paris Region). Its main objective is to understand the potential impacts of a LEZ in the Paris metropolitan area, in particular for goods vehicles. In conjunction with this development of LEZ, there has been a huge evolution in the motor technologies for commercial diesel vehicles. The industrial companies have also began to develop new hybrid and electric technologies, in anticipation of the scarcity of fossil oil and the future potential regulations only enabling non-polluting vehicles.