The environmental impact of urban transport: a case study for a new road in Catania Province

The opening of a new road to car traffic could represent a symbol of socioeconomic growth for a country, but in the meantime it could also cause significant impact to the local ecosystem in the absence of a preliminary study into the environmental impact which is able to forecast if it is necessary to carry out additional works to control the immissions into the atmosphere of the polluting exhausts of motor vehicles. The estimation of impact caused by the transit of motor vehicles is quite complex because it needs to know both the state of pollution at the present time and the forecasting of further immissions of polluting gasses caused by traffic on the planned future road. To achieve this, research evaluated the effect of the construction of a provincial road “S.P. Misterbianco-Nicolosi” in order to have both an experimental validation of a dispersion code for such an outdoor environment full of anthropic obstacles as well as to evaluate the respect of the limits of polluting gaseous concentrations fixed by current Italian regulations. This paper, therefore, intends to show the results of research and the adopted rules of procedure.