Urban buses have energy and environmental impacts because they are mostly equipped with heavy-duty diesel engines, having higher emission factors and pollution levels. This study proposed a mean distribution deviation (MDD) method to identify bus pollutant emissions including CO, CO₂, HC, and NO_X at road sections, intersections, and bus stops for different fuel types; and explore the changes in emissions for different locations in the road sections, bus stops, and intersection influence areas. Bus speed, acceleration, and emissions data were collected from four fuel types in China. For different locations and fuel types, the differences in emissions were all statistically significant. MDD values for different locations indicated that there were more obvious differences in emissions between road sections and intersections. In addition, heat maps were applied in this study to better understand changes in bus emissions for different locations in the bus stop influence areas, intersection influence areas, and road sections.

With the increased concern over sustainable development, many efforts have been made to alleviate air quality deterioration. Freeway toll plazas can cause serious pollution, due to the increased emissions caused by stop-and-go operations. Different toll collections and different fuel types obviously influence the vehicle emissions at freeway toll plazas. Therefore, this paper proposes a model tree-based vehicle emission model by considering these factors. On-road emissions data and vehicle operation data were obtained from two different freeway toll plazas. The statistical analysis indicates that different methods of toll collection and fuel types have significant impacts on vehicle emissions at freeway toll plazas. The performance of the proposed model was compared with a polynomial regression method. Based on the results, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) of the proposed model were all smaller, while the R-squared value increased from 0.714 to 0.833. Finally, the variations of vehicle emissions at different locations of freeway toll plazas were calculated and shown in heat maps. The results of this study can help better estimate the vehicle emissions and give advice to the development of electronic toll collection (ETC) lanes and relevant policies at freeway toll plazas.