Traffic Impacts on Environment at Signalized Intersections

China’s increasing pollution, especially smog, has been a severe life threat to the people living in megacities, such as Beijing. Many studies suggest that traffic is one of the major reasons of smog in many cities, but concrete evidence to support this argument is still missing. A potential reason could be lack of precise and accurate measurements of roadside air pollution that can help discover the correlation between air pollutants and traffic. Taking advantage of a newly developed, low-cost, and accurate roadside environmental measurement device, which can be used to accurately measure air quality including CO, CO2, NO2, SO2, O3, PM1.0, PM2.5, and PM10, and traffic information including flow, speed, and density, this research first archived three weeks of synchronous and minute-by-minute air quality and traffic data from two signalized intersections. It then conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis to explore and quantify the exact correlations between air pollutions and traffic. This research is expected to contribute to the improvement of air quality in big cities in China.