Baghdad Vehicle Traffic Congestion: Case Study

Vehicles contribute a considerable amount of green gas emission to the environment. Methods of calculating such emission using conventional measuring tools do not give an accurate future estimation as the number of vehicles increases, since there are many factors that affect the estimation such as traffic delays. Therefore, a different approach is should be considered in measuring road networks traffic capacity for a specific region, especially when the numbers of vehicles change dramatically during rush hours. Furthermore, the amount of fuel consumption wastage during traffic delays cannot be easily calculated based of on the number of vehicles solely. In this paper, a comprehensive study is made to examine and to calculate the effect of traffic congestion in Baghdad city of Iraq in terms of: pollution, fuel consumption, and time cost, using the road network simulator of SUMO. Several scenarios are considered with randomly selected paths for each vehicle. In this study, several empirical equations are extracted from the simulation test results. As a result, an aberration is observed in fuel consumption and traffic delays while exceeding 100 thousand vehicle capacity for the whole city of Baghdad. However, the interpolated equations can be used to approximately measure the traffic metrics for higher number of vehicles for the same city.