Assessing the Impact of Adopting Electrically Powered Vehicles on Kuwait’s Air Quality

Hourly average speeds across major roads in Kuwait were obtained through Google Maps Directions API over a period of 8 days in mid-November of 2017. Over the study period, the daily number of vehicles on road averaged at around 704,000 vehicles. The highest and lowest hourly number of vehicles stood at around 56,000 and 13,700 vehicles respectively. The lowest number of vehicles on road occurred on 3:00 of the 17th of Nov 2017 (Friday) whereas the highest number occurred on 16:00 of the 14th of Nov 2017 (Tuesday). Weekdays showed three distinctive peaks corresponding to people going off to work, public sector employees leaving work, and private sector employees leaving work respectively. Weekends showed one distinctive peak occurring at around 16:00 and coinciding with people going out on a holiday. The Fifth Ring Road accounted for most of the vehicles on road during the study period at around 11% of the travels. The First Ring Road took the lowest share of all travels during the study period at only 2%. A total number of 14 roads were included in this study. These roads were identified as major roads across Kuwait and contribute to most of the traffic across Kuwait at any given point in time. The model was successfully able to capture the trends associated with traffic flow across Kuwait. Waypoints were configured using Google’s Encoded Polyline Algorithm to prevent the API from rerouting the call for the average speed and effectively disrupting the model. In addition, both directions for every road were accounted for separately in the final model. One area where this study could be improved is by using sophisticated and distinctive models to represent the speed to density relationship across various roads which could be the subject of future work. Nevertheless, a simple logarithmic model was able to capture the trends quite accurately. Another area of improvement would be the inclusion of more roads across Kuwait to successfully account for more of the traffic flow.