In fact, the preliminary report says that average speed of vehicles "decreased" by a small amount between 8 AM and 11 AM when the restrictions were in force across locations.
The license-plate policy, which is set to make a comeback on April 15, managed to reduce car use by about 35 per cent and not "50 per cent", the report prepared by Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme of IIT-Delhi observes.
The Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) now has six such stations. The government, in its recent budget, has allocated money to build three more stations that monitor real-time air quality.
More importantly, it suggests that the decrease in emissions from cars may be "offset" by an increase in flow of other vehicles such as buses, three-wheelers and motorised two-wheelers.
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odd-even experiment summarises the results of traffic speed data, proportion of odd and even registration number-bearing cars on the roads, car occupancy and volume of car and motorised two-wheeler traffic.
The report, authored by Rahul Goel (now with Shiv Nadar University) and IIT Professors Geetam Tiwari and Dinesh Mohan, classified Delhi's roads into four categories, namely arterial roads, intercity roads, commercial roads, and ring roads.
It said that average speed of vehicles reduced by 5, 1, 3 and 4 per cent respectively in the same categories of roads respectively between 8 AM and 11 AM.
The report further observes that on both odd and even days about 30 per cent of the vehicles not with the "appropriate number" were on the roads. Factors including expemptions and non-compliance are held responsible for this.
The study obtained speed data using Google Maps Distance Matrix which provides real-time travel time between a given pair of locations, from which speed is calculated.