SHERPA-city: a web application to assess the impact of traffic measures on NO2 pollution in cities

Abstract

This paper presents SHERPA-City, a web application to assess the potential of traffic measures to abate NO2 air pollution in cities. The application is developed by the Joint Research Centre. It is freely available (https://integrated-assessment.jrc.ec.europa.eu) and allows the user to perform a fast screening of possible NO2 abatement measures addressing traffic in European cities. SHERPA-City results depend on the quality of the default input data. It is therefore important to stress that the SHERPA-City default traffic flows, emission factors, fleet composition, road network topology, NO2 pollution from other sources and meteorological data are based on EU-wide datasets that may not always represent perfectly a particular local situation. This is why the SHERPA-City allows the default data to be substituted by local data, to better reflect local features. This tool must be considered as a first step in exploring options to abate NO2 air pollution through transport measures. The final decisions should be based, wherever possible, on full-scale modelling studies incorporating local knowledge.