High-Mileage Light-Duty Fleet Vehicle Emissions: Their Potentially Overlooked Importance

State and local agencies in the United States use activity-based computer models to estimate mobile source emissions for inventories. These models generally assume that vehicle activity levels are uniform across all of the vehicle emission level classifications using the same age-adjusted travel fractions. Recent fuel-specific emission measurements from the SeaTac Airport, Los Angeles, and multi-year measurements in the Chicago area suggest that some high-mileage fleets are responsible for a disproportionate share of the fleet's emissions. Hybrid taxis at the airport show large increases in carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, and oxide of nitrogen emissions in their fourth year when compared to similar vehicles from the general population. Ammonia emissions from the airport shuttle vans indicate that catalyst reduction capability begins to wane after 5-6 years, 3 times faster than is observed in the general population, indicating accelerated aging. In Chicago, the observed, on-road taxi fleet also had significantly higher emissions and an emissions share that was more than double their fleet representation. When compounded by their expected higher than average mileage accumulation, we estimate that these small fleets (<1% of total) may be overlooked as a significant emission source (>2-5% of fleet emissions).