ABSTRACT
Studies of health effects associated with exposure to traffic-related air pollutants have typically used surrogates of exposure, such as residential proximity to roadways, traffic volumes on nearby roadways, and landuse regression techniques, to estimate exposure for the study population [1,2,3,4,5,6]. While these exposure metrics are relatively simple to generate and have minimal data requirements, they do not capture potentially important influences on spatial variability, and perhaps more importantly, temporal variability of traffic-related air pollutants such as factors that
affect dispersion [7]. Traffic-related air pollutants can have significant temporal variability due to traffic activity patterns (e.g., rush hour peaks, higher during weekdays vs. weekends), emission profiles that vary with temperature, and the influence of meteorology, which are not captured by static exposure estimates based on geographic parameters (i.e., proximity to roadway, traffic intensity, lane use, etc.) that are often used in traffic studies.
