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Estimating link level traffic emissions: enhancing MOVES with open-source data

Published: October 3, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.03362v1

By: Lijiao Wang , Muhammad Usama , Haris N. Koutsopoulos and more

BigTech Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Potential Business Impact:

**Cleans up car pollution estimates.**

Business Areas:
Smart Cities Real Estate

Open-source data offers a scalable and transparent foundation for estimating vehicle activity and emissions in urban regions. In this study, we propose a data-driven framework that integrates MOVES and open-source GPS trajectory data, OpenStreetMap (OSM) road networks, regional traffic datasets and satellite imagery-derived feature vectors to estimate the link level operating mode distribution and traffic emissions. A neural network model is trained to predict the distribution of MOVES-defined operating modes using only features derived from readily available data. The proposed methodology was applied using open-source data related to 45 municipalities in the Boston Metropolitan area. The "ground truth" operating mode distribution was established using OSM open-source GPS trajectories. Compared to the MOVES baseline, the proposed model reduces RMSE by over 50% for regional scale traffic emissions of key pollutants including CO, NOx, CO2, and PM2.5. This study demonstrates the feasibility of low-cost, replicable, and data-driven emissions estimation using fully open data sources.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
23 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)