On-road vehicle traffic is one of the largest sources of hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Underserved communities are consistently found to bear a disproportionate share of exposure to on-road vehicle traffic emissions while they are also expected to be disproportionally impacted by climate change. Recent studies have also called more attention to the air quality impacts of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, which emit significantly higher levels of air pollutants than light-duty vehicle traffic and are a known driver of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in exposure to air pollutants. While prior studies find that electrification of the on-road vehicle fleet can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improvement in air quality is far less certain. One challenge is that most national scale air quality analysis are too coarse to identify impacts within underserved communities or account for near-roadway exposures. Additionally, most studies have focused on endpoints, points in time when a large portion of vehicles are expected to be electric. The air quality impacts and environmental justice concerns during the transition period which could be long and uneven has received little attention. This research will address these limitations by using a refined near-roadway emission exposure surrogate that balances spatial precision and computational burden allowing the research team to estimate changes in exposure levels and health risks and the distribution of these burdens over time as EV adoption increases. The analysis will be carried out for every US census block over a 40-year transition period.
