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Article

The state of modelling for evaluating health equity impacts of freight emissions

 
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Publication: Transport Reviews
Pages: 1-25
Publication Date: 2025
Summary:

Evaluating health equity impacts of freight emissions is crucial for developing a sustainable and just freight system. It is a complex process that requires interdisciplinary knowledge, including transportation, environment, and public health. Full-chain simulation is an important approach for forecasting freight planning outcomes. However, a systematic framework that integrates available models in full-chain and is specifically designed for the freight sector has not been developed. We review 36 empirical studies covering this interdisciplinary topic, and summarise the commonly used models. We find that EMission FACtor (EMFAC) and Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) models are commonly used to estimate freight vehicle emissions, with their outputs serving as inputs for air quality models, such as Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) or Intervention model for air pollution (InMAP). To estimate the health effects, concentration-response (C-R) functions, combined with static or dynamic demographic and socioeconomic data, are used to quantify the relationship between changes in pollutant concentrations and health outcomes. Then, disparity analysis relies on the assumption of age-specific C-R functions and examines statistical differences between demographic groups – including racial/ethnic groups, income levels, age groups, and other vulnerable communities. This study comprehensively outlines this state-of-the-art, integrated framework identified through the synthesis of this interdisciplinary literature. This framework can support future researchers in this field and policymakers.

Recommended Citation:
Zhengtao Qin, Anne Goodchild, Travis Fried, Sarah Dennis-Bauer & Quan Yuan (09 Oct 2025): The state of modelling for evaluating health equity impacts of freight emissions, Transport Reviews, DOI: 10.1080/01441647.2025.2566679

Optimization of Supply and Transportation Networks in an Epidemic Situation in Collaboration with the Seattle Flu Study

The mission of the Seattle Flu Study (SFS) is to prototype city-scale capabilities for epidemic preparedness and response. One of the aims of this study is to understand methods to implement rapid interventions outside of clinical settings and within 48-72 hours of the onset of symptoms, to enable the immediate diagnosis, treatment, or isolation of flu-positive individuals.

SFS has reached out to the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington to test various to develop models and perform sensitivity analyses on epidemic response scenarios via simulation and mathematical optimization. Modeling will allow SFS to measure and understand questions like, “when will our supply chain break?”, “how do you prevent it from breaking?” and “how do you get drugs and tests to people if your driver workforce gets sick?”. By modeling these types of scenarios, they will be able to assess the pros and cons of various supply chain strategies and develop multiple levers that can be pulled depending on the epidemic situation including prepositioning of orders, and leveraging in-house and supplementary private transportation alternatives (FedEx, etc.).