Study on sensitivity of national annual pollutant emission from passenger cars to traffic patterns

The paper presents the results of the study on the sensitivity of the national annual pollutant emission from passenger cars to traffic patterns. The study was carried out in accordance with the methodology applied in the COPERT 4 software. The traffic pattern was modelled as the share of road lengths under various traffic conditions: urban, rural and on motorways and expressways, in the total length of trips covered by vehicles. A relatively small and less varied sensitivity of the national annual pollutant emission from passenger cars to the traffic pattern was found due to the substance emitted. This was considered to be a valuable proposal for the selection of parameters for the total emission model of vehicular pollutants, in view of the difficulty of estimating the share of road lengths under model traffic conditions.