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Transport Activity Measurement Toolkit (TAMT)

4pm, July 28th, 2015

The Transport Activity Measurement Toolkit is an open-source toolkit to process GPS log files for vehicle emissions drive cycle calculations to support greenhouse gas emission modeling for on-road transport. Its development is sponsored by the World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean Region Sustainable Development Department Transport Cluster in conjunction with the World Bank’s Environment-Climate Change (ENV-CC) Department.

There is an old engineering adage that you cannot improve something that you are not measuring. This is particularly true for on-road transport emissions, and this toolkit aims to reduce both global and local emissions highlights the need to be able to accurately measure them, and detect and monitor changes over time.

Whilst for other sources of emissions, like power plant smokestacks, it is possible to go and measure the output of each, the vast number of vehicles, operated under different driving styles and conditions, makes such measurement techniques impossible and requires statistics and sampling techniques to be used. The process is further complicated by the fact that the “do nothing” or ” business as usual” scenario involves vehicle emissions constantly changing over time due to changes in the size and characteristics of the vehicle fleet, in vehicle owners’ driving habits, and in the driving conditions that these vehicles find on the routes that they commonly use.

Vehicle activity measurements have many practical applications towards analyzing development pathways and options, defining policy packages, designing interventions, and determining the outcome of each. Whilst the measurement techniques can be the same, different levels of precision may be required for different projects. In some, such as the UNFCCC CDM, low levels of uncertainty are essential whilst for others, directional guidance (that indicates if a situation is improving or deteriorating) may be all that is required.

The practitioner’s guide aims to give practical advice on how such measurements can be made, the techniques that can be used, and the frequency and location of such measurements. It is intended to provide useful advice for anyone who is looking to perform vehicle activity measurements with or without using the TAMT Appliance. It does however, also provide a users-manual for the TAMT Appliance.

The assign module of the TAMT appliance allows you to import and assign GPS points to TAMT roads and zones.  You can access video demonstrations of the assign module, narrated by Stuart Moffat here:

Demo part 1
Demo part 2

You can also see a video demonstration of the tag module, a custom road classification utility using Google maps here:

Read the practitioner’s guide.

Institutions Involved

  • World Bank

Authors

John A. Rogers
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