Zhong-Ren Peng

University of Florida | UF · Department of Urban and Regional Planning

Eco-driving is considered a cost-effective way to reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions. However, eco-driving strategies for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are understudied. Therefore, this study analyzed extensive road test data to assess HEV carbon reduction under different driving behaviors and to identify optimal eco-driving conditions....

The relationship between green and grey urban infrastructure, local meteorological conditions, and traffic-related air pollution is complex and dynamic. This case study examined the effect of evolving morphologies around a city square park in Dublin and explores the twin impacts of local urban development (grey) and maturing parks (green) on partic...

In near-road neighborhoods, residents are more frequently exposed to traffic-related air pollution (TRAP), and they are increasingly aware of pollution levels. Given this consideration, this study adopted portable air pollutant sensors to conduct a mobile monitoring campaign in two near-road neighborhoods, one in an urban area and one in a suburban...

Many American cities are testing autonomous shuttles (AS), or self-driving minibuses, as a new mode of public transportation. Existing AS studies often rely on stated preference (SP) surveys that require participants to imagine AS scenarios, or they evaluate short-term pilot programs, thus lacking long-term user insights-particularly in car-depende...

Air pollution is a growing concern in metropolitan areas worldwide, and Shanghai, as one of the world’s busiest ports, faces significant challenges in local air pollution control. Assessing the contribution of a specific port to air pollution is essential for effective environmental management and public health improvement, making the analysis of a...

Electronic toll collection (ETC) has been designed and implemented to improve traffic efficiency and reduce traffic-related air pollution. However, the real-world impact of ETC on these factors is currently under-qualified. With this consideration, we attempted to reveal the effect of ETC on traffic efficiency and traffic pollution using portable e...

Daytime atmospheric pollution has received wide attention, while the vertical structures of atmospheric pollutants at night play a crucial role in the photochemical process on the following day, which is still less reported. Focusing on Guangzhou, a megacity of South China, we established an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with micro detecto...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly gaining prominence as a crucial technology to transform and reshape the field of urban planning. However, several unanswered questions persist regarding the potential impacts of AI on urban and regional planning research and practice, as well as the issues involved and the appropriate responses and plans. Thi...

Vehicles generally move smoothly and with high speeds on elevated roads, thereby producing specific traffic-related carbon emissions in contrast to ground roads. Hence, a portable emission measurement system was adopted to determine traffic-related carbon emissions. The on-road measurement results revealed that the instantaneous emissions of CO2 an...

Short-term prediction of urban air quality is critical to pollution management and public health. However, existing studies have failed to make full use of the spatiotemporal correlations or topological relationships among air quality monitoring networks (AQMN), and hence exhibit low precision in regional prediction tasks. With this consideration,...

The implementation of short-term traffic restriction policies (TRPs) during major events positively influences the traffic emission reduction. However, few studies explore the impact of diesel vehicle emissions on air quality during short-term TRP. Also, the intertwined influences of short-term TRP and Spring Festival remains unclear. Based on Beij...

Urban green spaces have economic, social, and environmental value in the built environment. The case study evaluates the relationship between urban form and nature-based solutions (NbS) – in the form of dense vegetation and lawn areas - on local air quality from traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) sources, specifically particulate matter (PM). A c...

The concepts of resilience and sustainability are becoming popular in disaster planning and management. However, there is an absence of mutual considerations of the two concepts from an integrated perspective to promote post-disaster livelihood, particularly in the relocated rural communities. To fill the research gap, this paper explores the facto...

Unlabelled: In hazy days, several local authorities always implemented the strict traffic-restriction measures to improve the air quality. However, owing to lack of data, the quantitative relationships between them are still not clear. Coincidentally, traffic restriction measures during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an experimental setup for reve...

The distribution pattern of near-road air pollutants is important for addressing air pollution issues. In this study, size-segregated particle number concentration (PNC) and black carbon (BC) concentration were measured at different locations perpendicular to a major roadway in Shanghai, aiming to improve the understanding of distribution patterns...

On-road vehicle has been a prominent emission source, hence a key target of control for environment, health, and climate concerns. While considerable efforts have been made to investigate criteria pollutants such as adverse gaseous and particulate emissions across the world, there is limited systematic research to characterize on-road carbon emissi...

On-road vehicle has been a prominent emission source, hence a key target of control for environment, health, and climate concerns. While considerable efforts have been made to investigate criteria pollutants such as adverse gaseous and particulate emissions across the world, there is limited systematic research to characterize on-road carbon emissi...

The socio-economic effects of urban elevated roads have been well-documented in previous studies. Nevertheless, the environmental impacts of the elevated road location are rarely considered. In this study, we quantified such impacts on four traffic pollutants (e.g., NO, NO2, CO, and O3) in Shanghai, using the two-year observation data from Shanghai...

This study contributes to quantifying the coupling impacts of multiple factors including traffic, meteorology, and built environment on particle (PM) distributions at urban neighborhood scales. Increasing knowledge of the PM distribution characteristics and the quantification of multifactorial effects could assist in alleviating pollution. However,...

Viaduct is a ubiquitous transportation infrastructure in the congested megacities worldwide to improve the accessibility and capacity of urban transportation network. However, there is a lack of understanding of the impacts of the interplay between viaduct-ground emissions and viaduct-canyon configurations on the particle distribution in urban stre...

Since 2010, Shanghai port has been the world's busiest container port in the world. Evidently, it vastly promotes economic development in China. However, it also causes environmental problems, particularly air pollution in Shanghai. Therefore, a series of mobile monitoring experiments were performed to reveal the particle characteristics of high-de...

The concepts of resilience and sustainability are becoming popular in disaster planning and management. However, there is an absence of mutual considerations of the two concepts from an integrated perspective to promote post-disaster livelihood, particularly in the relocated rural communities. To fill the research gap, this paper explores the facto...

Traffic surveillance of mountain roads accords problems of high risk, low efficiency, and high cost; thus, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are introduced for traffic surveillance, working in conjunction with a delivery van. UAVs are assigned to monitor the high-risk road segments, while the low-risk segments are monitored by the delivery van. UAVs...

The transportation system, particularly the surface transportation system, has been evolving, albeit slowly. But that evolution has been exacerbated recently toward a smarter, more sustainable, and more resilient system. Connected and automated technologies enable vehicles smarter; electrical vehicles, and shared mobility, particularly shared micro...

Roadside green barriers as a potential solution to reduce the impacts of traffic emission on the surroundings has attracted considerable attention, but their effects on the distribution of particulate matter, either through adsorbing and settling atmospheric particulate matter on the road or hindering the dispersion of particulate matter due to the...

There are many studies on the horizontal diffusion of traffic emissions on the roadside, but not enough on the three-dimensional diffusion patterns mainly because of the lack of three-dimensional monitoring data. However, understanding three-dimensional diffusion patterns is critical because it is closely related to the health exposure of residents...

The ambient formation of secondary particulate matter (ambient FSPM) is commonly recognized as the major cause of severe PM2.5 air pollution in China. We present observational evidence showing that the ambient FSPM was too weak to yield a detectable contribution to extreme PM2.5 pollution events that swept northern China between 11 and 14 January 2...

Accurate air quality forecasts can provide data-driven supports for governmental departments to control air pollution and further protect the health of residents. However, existing air quality forecasting models mainly focus on site-specific time series forecasts at a local level, and rarely consider the spatiotemporal relationships among regional...

Variations in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) structure present a close relationship with the vertical diffusion of air pollutants. However, the effect of the ABL structure on the vertical distribution of air pollutants is rarely investigated in detail, especially through in-situ measurement. In this study, from November 26th to December 20th,...

Recent climatic disasters have shown the vulnerability of transportation infrastructures against natural hazards. To understand the risk of coastal hazards on urban travel activities, this study presents an activity-based modeling approach to evaluate the impacts of storm surge on the transportation network under sea-level rise in Miami-Dade County...

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, various lockdown strategies restrained global economic growth bringing a significant decline in maritime transportation. However, the previous studies have not adequately recognized the specific impacts of COVID-19 on maritime transportation. In this study, a series of analyses of the Baltic Dry Inde...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding lockdown measures have been confirmed to reduce the air pollution in major megacities worldwide. Especially at some monitoring hotspots, NO2 has been verified to show a significant decrease. However, the diffusion pattern of these hotspots in responding to COVID-19 is not clearly understood at present sta...

The increasing knowledge in the distributions of air pollutants influenced by vegetation could facilitate reducing human exposure in residential areas. However, the distribution patterns of submicron particles (PM1) in residential areas have not been clearly recognized, particularly for vertical distribution at high altitudes, which are closely ass...

The gradual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations has attracted worldwide attention for its strong relationships with global climate change. Considerable efforts are being undertaken to characterize spatiotemporal variations of CO2 at a city, regional and national level, aiming at providing pipelines for carbon emission reduct...

This article deals with household‐level flood risk mitigation. We present an agent‐based modeling framework to simulate the mechanism of natural hazard and human interactions, to allow evaluation of community flood risk, and to predict various adaptation outcomes. The framework considers each household as an autonomous, yet socially connected, agen...

Traffic restriction policy (TRP) is common practice to alleviate urban congestion and air pollution. However, effects of TRP for non-local vehicles and elevated expressways on local and regional air quality are understudied. Using air pollutant data collected by ground-based national and roadside environmental monitoring stations and field measurem...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been argued to be the ‘great equaliser’, but, in fact, ethnically and racially segregated communities are bearing a disproportionate burden from the disease. Although more people have been infected and died from the disease among these minority communities, still fewer people in these communities are complying with the sug...

Rebuilding communities requires an actionable approach to explicitly translate the concept of resilience into postdisaster recovery planning. Through clustering analysis using project titles and project summary, 940 resilience projects are grouped into infrastructure prototypes, economic development prototypes, housing prototypes, and environmental...

Increasing knowledge in the law of particulate matter (PM) distributions beside elevated expressways could assist in addressing the deterioration of urban air quality. However, the vertical distribution patterns of PM concentration have not been clearly recognized due to limited measurement methods. Hence, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) measurements...

The vertical distribution patterns of PM2.5 (particulate matters with diameters ≤2.5 μm) are crucial for understanding the aggregation, dispersion, and regional transport of PM2.5. However, due to the measurement limitation, the vertical observational data o is difficult to be obtained and is relatively insufficient at present stage. With this cons...

Few studies have examined the critical role of policy and network governance mechanism in addressing sustainability and FEW nexuses. This study aims to examine the efforts in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the urban environment. More specifically, the study seeks to examine how growing demands on the food-energy-water (FEW)...

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to study the effects of urban lockdown policies on the variation in pollutant concentrations and to characterize the recovery patterns of urban air pollution under the interruption of COVID-19 lockdown policies. In this paper, interruption-recovery models and regression discontinuity design were develop...

Accurate prediction of traffic status in real time is critical for advanced traffic management and travel navigation guidance. There are many attempts to predict short-term traffic flows using various deep learning algorithms. Most existing prediction models are only tested on spatiotemporal data assuming no missing data entries. However, this idea...

In port areas, traffic is characterized by container trucks which run on diesel, while in urban areas it is characterized by private cars which run on petrol. The different fuels as pollution sources cause distinct particle pollution. This study offers an in-depth investigation of particle pollution and corresponding short-term exposures in port an...

Toll stations are traffic-related pollution hotspots, but the contribution of various factors to pollutant distributions has not been clearly recognized. This study conducted a field investigation of the spatiotemporal variations of pollutants on different lanes at a toll station in Shanghai, China. Quantitative analysis showed that the concentrati...

Urban heat islands (UHI) and global climate change pose serious threats to human health, making health risk appraisal of urban space as well as the planning and improvement of green space important research projrcts. Meteorological sites, satellite images, electronic maps, questionnaire survey data, statistical yearbooks, ArcGIS spatial analysis te...

As Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are one of the precursors of ozone, their distribution and variable concentrations are highly related to local ozone pollution control. In this study, we obtained vertical profiles of VOCs in Shanghai’s Jinshan district on 8 September and 9 September in 2016 to investigate their distribution and impact on local...

At the crosswalk of urban traffic intersections, vehicles frequently stop with their engines idling adjacent to it during the red-light period and accelerate with intensified emissions during the green-light period. As a result, pedestrians are inevitably at a higher risk of exposure to near-source traffic-related air pollution while walking on the...

Urban conditions are monitored by a wide variety of sensors that measure several attributes, such as temperature and traffic volume. The correlations of sensors help to analyze and understand the urban conditions accurately. The correlated attribute pattern (CAP) mining discovers correlations among multiple attributes from the sets of sensors spati...

The United States is bearing the brunt of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The spatially uneven viral spread and community inequality will jointly bring about worse consequences. The combined effects on U.S. communities remain unclear, however. Given spatially heterogeneous compliance with the stay-at-home orders and the varying timing of local...

In roadside environments, commuters are exposed to a high level of traffic-related pollution. Despite vegetation is often used to mitigate air pollution in road environments, its air quality impacts are complex and could be both positive or negative depending on specific conditions. This study conducted field measurements to assess the air quality...

Roadside green infrastructure (GI) has attracted worldwide attention for its potentials to alleviate local air pollution. However, previous studies have not clearly characterized the effects of roadside GI on personal exposure levels to vehicular emissions, particularly for cyclists and pedestrians on the pathways between urban roads and vegetative...

Traffic is a significant pollution source in cities and has caused various health and environmental concerns worldwide. Therefore, the improved understanding of traffic impacts on particle concentrations could help mitigate air pollution. In this study, field measurements were conducted beside an arterial road in Shanghai, China, to obtain the fine...

How to make city cycling—the most sustainable means of travel—safe, practical, and convenient for all. Cycling is the most sustainable means of urban travel, practical for most short- and medium-distance trips—commuting to and from work and school, shopping, visiting friends—as well as for recreation and exercise. Cycling promotes physical, social,...

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly inhibited global economic growth and impacted the environment. Some evidence suggests that lockdown strategies have significantly reduced traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) in regions across the world. However, the impact of COVID-19 on TRAP on roadside is still not clearly understood. In this study, we...

It is challenging to forecast high-resolution spatial-temporal patterns of intra-urban air pollution and identify impacting factors at the regional scale. Studies have attempted to capture features of air pollutants such as fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) using land use regression models, but this method overlooks the...

The increased knowledge in distribution patterns of traffic-related pollutants can help address the problems of air pollution. Utilities of instrumented unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) who have high mobility are an effective approach to investigate the pollutant distributions. However, UAV-based observations are mostly conducted in open suburban ar...

Typical air pollution events involving ozone (O3) and PM2.5 occurred frequently in China, while the fine-scale pollution variation, especially at a neighborhood level (2 km*2 km), is complex and still not clear. To assess how urban form and meteorology influence neighborhood air pollution distribution, this study took the Minhang district in Shangh...

The establishment of an effective roadside air quality forecasting model provides important information for proper traffic management to mitigate severe pollution, and for alerting resident’s outdoor plans to minimize exposure. Current deterministic models rely on numerical simulation and the tuning of parameters, and empirical models present power...

Vertical observations of ozone (O3) and fine aerosol particles (PM2.5) below 3000 m above ground level were made by an O3 lidar and two hexacopter unmanned aerial system (UAS) platforms to investigate vertical distributions of the boundary-layer O3 and PM2.5 and their effects on surface air quality. Field observations were conducted in Shanghai, Ch...

Adaptation has become the major approach to reduce the adverse effects of storm surge and sea-level rise. However, maladaptation can happen when adaptation actions unintentionally increase community vulnerability. To evaluate the adequacy and efficacy of adaptation policies under uncertain sea-level rise, this study presents an agent-based model by...

Because proper urban planning and design can improve transit sharing, the impact of the built environment on transit use has attracted the attention of many researchers. Factors with different geographical scales such as individual characteristics, neighborhood built environment, and regional features can influence transit use. However, the nested...

The quantification of the differences in the magnitudes of black carbon (BC) concentrations between electronic and manual toll lanes is necessary to understand the impacts of toll plazas to air pollution. This study investigated the space-time distribution of BC concentrations and compared the BC pollution profiles between traffics and toll collect...

Home prices and rent prices in the USA have been growing steadily over the past decade. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has decimated entire sectors of the American economy, which makes the homebuying decision more intricate. We mapped multiple metrics to indicate the best place to buy a house amid COVID-19. For many counties in the central area of...

Amid sweeping efforts to get Americans to stay at home to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease, we geovisualized how foot traffic has increased or declined in relation to six types of trips across the United States: homes, workplaces, retail and recreation establishments, parks, grocery stores and pharmacies, and transit stations. The geovisu...