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Impact assessment of Bilbao’s metro

2005; WIT Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2495/978-1-85312-799-1/03

1755-8336

Gabriel Ibarra‐Berastegi, Iosu Madariaga,

Odor and Emission Control Technologies

Bilboa is a city with a population of half a million people located in North-Central Spain. In the month of November of 1995 in Bilbao an underground railway was inaugurated. This paper reports the effects that this metro has had on the traffic congestion and also air pollution of Bilbao city. In Bilbao, as in many other cities in the world, pollution due to photochemical smog and carbon monoxide are mainly due to traffic and nowadays represent a problem of major concern. However, levels of other pollutants like SO(2) are not originated by traffic. To address the problem of traffic congestion and with the aim of providing a better mobility to citizens, the local authorities built, in 1995, an underground railway connecting the central area and surrounding s of Bilbao. In this paper, the impact that this new metro has had will be analyzed. To that end, the evolution of congestion and air pollution will be analyzed as two indicators of the overall impact of this infrastructure. Traffic congestion and air pollution levels in Bilbao have been analyzed jointly for the 1993-1998 period. For that purpose, data from air pollution and the meteorological network existing in Bilbao have been used as well as data from the traffic network in the area. The analyzed pollutants have been ozone, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. In the case of ozone, meteorological effects have been removed from the original time series using the KZ filter. The results show that the new metro was at first (year 1996) responsible for a reduction of traffic and air pollution. However, 1-2 years later traffic and air pollution recovered the increasing trend they showed since 1993. The reason is that to obtain permanent reductions of traffic congestion and air pollution, apart from the metro, complementary measures should be adopted to discourage the use of vehicles in Bilbao.