Challenge
In order to meet the Flemish goals with respect to air quality and climate standards, local governments, as directors of public space, will have to take effective and well-considered mobility measures.
The Department of Mobility and Public Works and the Flemish Environment Agency want to support local governments in this by developing a Digital Twin application. This application will enable local governments, in a user-friendly and interactive way, to calculate the impact of traffic measures on air quality and CO₂ emissions so that local governments can make well-founded decisions.
In addition, the application should also offer the possibility to quickly calculate promising traffic measures. Thus, local governments can quickly make indicative estimates of modal split. Route effects can also optionally be calculated, hence more calculation time will be required. Local governments will be able to predict the traffic impact of a traffic measure. With a longer computation time, one can also obtain a relatively quick estimate of the effects on route choice.
This dual goal results in a collaboration between the Department of Mobility and Public Works and the Flemish Environment Agency, in which the intent is to develop an essential building block: a calculation tool for the effects of local mobility measures on the environment, the output of which includes vehicle performance expressed in vehicle kilometers. The Flemish Environment Agency already has another building block that converts vehicle performance into detailed air quality simulations. The intent is to link these systems so that mobility and environmental impacts can be analyzed in an integrated manner.
This innovative approach will enable local governments to contribute more efficiently and effectively to improved air quality and reduced CO₂ emissions.
