FHWA Resource Center
AIR QUALITY TEAM
Solutions
EMIT - Easy Mobile Inventory Tool
The Air Quality Technical Service Team at the FHWA Resource Center has designed and constructed the Easy Mobile Inventory Tool (EMIT) to assist transportation professionals in rural and small urban areas in completing a locale-specific mobile source emission inventory. EMIT incorporates a graphical-user interface to the MOBILE6.2 model allowing implementation of those locale-specific parameters addressed in the Environmental Protection Agency's technical guidance, including external conditions, vehicle fleet characteristics, vehicle activity, vehicle fuel specifications, and state programs. The tool also includes components for forecasting congested vehicle speeds and vehicle-miles of travel as a function of area type and functional classification defined in the FHWA Highway Performance Measurement System (HPMS) based on methodologies developed by the Texas Transportation Institute. Information is keyed into EMIT in four steps: 1) basic MOBILE6.2 data; 2) MOBILE6.2 fuel options/state programs; 3) monthly (or hourly) MOBILE6.2 data; and 4) HPMS data. EMIT was designed primarily for mobile source emission inventory calculations in rural or small urban areas without a travel demand forecasting (TDF) model, but the program can serve as a simplified graphical user interface for the MOBILE6.2 model for application in any area. The program runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, providing modes for processing congested vehicle speeds; creating the appropriate MOBILE6.2 data file; executing the MOBILE6.2 model; post-processing MOBILE6.2 model output; multiplying the related emission factors and vehicle-miles of travel; and displaying emission inventory results.
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
