TRUE at the New Mobility Congress 2022
The Real Urban Emissions (TRUE) Initiative findings on Warsaw’s real-world fleet emissions were presented during the 2022 New Mobility Congress session on low-emission zones in Lodz, Poland.
The event is the largest sustainable transport gathering in the Central Eastern European (CEE) region and gathered a broad swathe of experts and practitioners in the industry, including vehicle manufacturers, technology and infrastructure companies, transport operators, and policymakers to facilitate knowledge and experience exchange.
International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) associate researcher, Kaylin Lee, presented the TRUE Initiative findings during a panel discussion identifying opportunities and challenges in developing low-emission zones in the region. Lee highlighted that in the CEE region where gasoline vehicles are more predominant than diesel vehicles, low-emission zones can be an important policy tool for curbing pollutant emissions. Prior TRUE remote sensing studies have shown that diesel vehicles have NOX emissions multiple times the type-approval limits and contribute disproportionately to emissions of harmful air pollutants in urban conditions. Particularly, the TRUE studies assessing the real-world emissions of vehicles in Warsaw and Sofia, Bulgaria revealed that a low-emission zone targeting a small group of old, high-emitting diesel vehicles can bring about outsized emissions benefits. Further, an effective low-emission zone policy should be supported by real-world data that can be used not only to identify high-emitting vehicle groups but also to assess the potential impact of different low-emission zone design and implementation options. This assessment based on real-world data is supporting Sofia, a heavily motorized with persistent air pollution problems, to introduce the first low-emission zone in the CEE region.
