Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/290010 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-1398
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
Road congestion and air pollution are key challenges for quality of life in urban settings. This research leverages highly disaggregated crowdsourced data from Latin America to study the effect of road congestion on levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter in four of the most congested cities in developing countries: Bogota, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Santiago. Based on a panel data econometric approach with over 4.4 billion records from Waze and hourly data from 54 air monitoring stations for 2019, our two-stage least square model shows a cumulative increase of 0.6% in response to a 1% of road congestion on the three air pollutants. Moreover, we find a nonlinear relationship between road congestion and air quality and estimate the threshold above which the effect decays. This study provides evidence that supports public policies designed to make urban mobility more sustainable by implementing measures to reduce road congestion in developing contexts.
Subjects: 
road congestion
air quality
urban mobility
sustainability
developing countries
LatinAmerica
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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