Pandemic impact on air pollution and mobility in a Latin American medium-size city

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected lifestyles everywhere, changing urban traffic circulation worldwide. This paper focuses on the impact of the pandemic on air pollution from mobile sources in a Latin American medium-size city: Bahía Blanca (Argentina). Vehicle flow and corresponding emissions were evaluated before (January and March 2020) and after (June and November 2020) the lockdown. Vehicular traffic flows were measured and their segmentations were calculated. Emissions dispersion was modelled by employing R-Line, through the use of AERMOD. A decrease was observed not only in vehicular flow (~23%), but also in pollutant and greenhouse gas concentrations (~70%), in line with other research. Changes in mobility habits were observed, which were reflected by the different proportion of the vehicle-fleet segmentation, with a significant drop in the buses (~66%) together with the appearance of a bicycle peak (~53%), which is unusual for the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Air pollution
• COVID-19 pandemic
• urban mobility

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr Erica Yanina Sanchez in regard to pollutant dispersion modelling, and to María Fernanda Martin in regard to environmental pollution.

Authors’ contributions

Grassi: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing- original draft, Writing-Reviewing & Editing.

Brignole: Funding acquisition, Resources, Writing-Reviewing and Editing.

Díaz: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Supervision, Writing-Reviewing & Editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS), Bahía Blanca, Argentina, [Grant N° PGI 24/M158]. This project is entitled ‘Cheminformatics applied to the discovery of new polymeric materials, new drugs, and environmental problems’.