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When estimating future transportation costs for car users, there is some agreement that these costs are likely to increase over the upcoming decades. The reasons are multifaceted: rising prices for crude oil, large investments in alternative energy supply and in corresponding demand-side infrastructure as well as road pricing schemes or taxes in order to internalize negative external effects of road traffic. Rising costs are likely to change aggregated air pollutant emissions as well as their spatial distribution. Especially in urban areas where demand for road traffic is high, a reduction of air pollutant emissions could mitigate the negative impacts on human health and the environment. It is likely that rising car user costs lead to such a reduction in car travel demand. However, it is still an open question whether congestion relief, in addition to the impact of a decrease in demand, yields potentials for lowering local air pollutant emissions. For this purpose, a real-world scenario of the Munich metropolitan area in Germany is set up and simulated with the large-scale multi-agent microsimulation MATSim. The software is capable of simulating complete daily plans of several million individuals and allows emission calculations on a detailed level, e.g. for a single street or a single vehicle over the time of day. Varying emission levels resulting from different vehicle characteristics, road categories, speed levels, and traffic situations are considered. By mapping emissions back to the emission source, i.e. the road segment, a spatial analysis of air pollutant emissions is performed, identifying areas with high car travel demand and the resulting changes in emissions due to a decrease in demand. We find that car user price elasticities of demand for different subpopulations, including inner-urban travelers and commuters, are in a reasonable range. Price elasticities of emissions turn out to be higher than those of demand. This implies that when car user costs rise, the reduction of air pollutant emissions is higher than the decrease in car travel demand. In a more disaggregated analysis, we obtain that congestion relief is likely to lower emissions per vehicle kilometer on urban roads. However, we also find that congestion relief can lead to higher emissions per vehicle kilometer for high-speed arterials or tangential motorways.

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