Near-Roadway Air Quality: Synthesizing the Findings from Real-World Data

Despite increasing regulatory attention and literature linking roadside air pollution to health outcomes, studies on near roadway air quality have not yet been well synthesized. We employ data collected from 1978 as reported in 41 roadside monitoring studies, encompassing more than 700 air pollutant concentration measurements, published as of June 2008. Two types of normalization, background and edge-of-road, were applied to the observed concentrations. Local regression models were specified to the concentration-distance relationship and analysis of variance was used to determine the statistical significance of trends. Using an edge-of-road normalization, almost all pollutants decay to background by 115-570 m…

• UE
  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• CD
  California Department of Transportation
• UO
  University of California, Davis